lundi, 26 février 2018

More often than not, rules of conduct in the international field are formed by historical, cultural, religious and philosophical principles of the people (the elite), rooted in a certain geographical area. The persistence with which the mistress of the seas can boast creating new colonies far away from the Albion coasts can be seen even today: Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas in Argentina), the Commonwealth member-states; the American Frontier Spirit transformed into a relentless desire to conduct democratic reforms in the world, and keenness on the Leo Strauss’s ideas (the scientist himself claiming the need to use double standards) helped several American neoconservatives to fulfill their ideas; Jewish messianism allowed not only the creation of the State of Israel, but also to place the country on the international level.

India also has its own national strategy which, perhaps, is not quite clear to us because of the Hindu world view, although this huge country has a significant number of not only followers of ancient polytheistic tradition and its branch, but also representatives of other cultures and religions: Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, all kind of Christians and Jews (six different religious Judaic groups live in different parts of India, some of them are autochthonous and adopted it in the second half of the XX century).

With the use of new analysis of the various doctrinal positions, it is possible to understand India's geopolitical strategy through the prism of the strategic culture of the subcontinent, which affects the entire South East of Asia in some way. Why is it important? The British theorist of international relations Professor Ken Booth gave the answer on the issue in the 1970s: “When thinking about the rational behavior of others, strategists tend to project their own cultural values ​​... but it should be apparent that one can only predict the behavior of a ‘rational man’ if both observer and the observed share the similar logical powers. Ethnocentric perception interferes in this process: they may mean that’s one own values and sense of priorities are projected onto others. By this process, ethnocentricity undermines the central act in the strategy of estimating how others will see and then will see and act.”[i]

For Hindus, the ethnocentric worldview is quite acceptable, as Hinduism is a “closed” religion, only Hindus can profess it, so the adoption of tradition is not possible. The Sikhs, having prominent positions in the government, are natives of Hindustan; the monotheistic religion began from the Islam and Hinduism contact as the response to the conflict issue. The special case is the Parsees, concentrating in the Mumbai, but, it’s interesting that the Zoroastrianism is a closed religion too; the proselytism is not recognized by the Indian Parsees. Indian Muslims and Christians are interesting in a particular way, even for external forces, because the general political strategy of the current Indian leadership is still based on the Hindu worldview in its various forms (epos, philosophy, religion, culture).

Another British geopolitical theorist, Colin Gray, involved in the connection of the cultural layers and the State strategy said: “No one and no institution can operate beyond culture”, and then added that "the nature and function of the strategy are unchanging and universal, and dynamic historical form and content are inescapably cultural".[ii]

It is necessary to try to look at the political culture of the country to understand its actions in the international arena, not only in terms of pragmatism, which mainly focuses on the supply and security of energy resources, but also in terms of the worldview.

After India became independence in 1947, the country was mainly regarded as pacifist, because of the Mahatma Gandhi strategy toward the British colonialists. A non-resistance to evil with violence was popular in the various anti-war movements in Western Europe and particularly in the USA during the Vietnam War. However, Gandhi used the concept of Satyagraha (insistence on truth) as an instrument of political struggle that was not based on national and popular Hindu tradition, but on the eclectic mixture of reformist Hinduism, the Upanishads and Jainism philosophy, promoting prohibition of the living creature’s murder, including harmful insects. The post-colonial heritage is important too. In the 1980s, А. К. Коul of the University of Delhi said that the whole concept of international law was based on the rationale and justification of the lawfulness of the Third World enslavement and plunder, which has been declared uncivilized.[iii] Such a critical approach sought for new ways to solve problems, and Koul introduced the concept of international law, which aimed at solving the problems of underdeveloped countries. He was supported by the international affairs lawyer R. P Anand, noting that "since international law is now supposed to be applicable to the world-wide community of states, including the new Asian-African states, it needs their consent no less. It must be modified to suit new interests and a new community."[iv] Despite the quite reasonable thoughts, ideas of these scientists were not relevant for the era. But now these concepts may well be applied within framework of BRICS.

If you look at India's political transformation, the Constitutional model was borrowed from the USA, and it was developed considering the cultural characteristics of each region (India has 28 states, 21 official languages, and more than 1,600 dialects). The traditional caste system is preserved in fact, but legally all Indians have equal rights and possibilities, the lower castes representatives in the southern states even formed the Dalit Panthers political movement and gathered foreign assistance (incl. Soros foundation and US organizations) for the promotion of their rights.

Throughout the independent state’s history, within Indian political circles, the fluctuation from secularism to traditionalism was also noticeable. Despite this fact, as Stephen Cohen noted, since Nehru to Rajiv Gandhi’s term and then under the Vajpayee’s Indian People's Party there was antagonism in local cultural issues (the previous ruling Congress was secular, whilst Vajpayee’s Party was culturally nationalistic – Hindutva), the international and defense policy remained the same strategic policy[v]. It is worth noting that the Indian People Party (Bharatiya Janata Party), founded in 1980, received special attention from the American analysts, as, during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee term, the relations with the US were improved. The governing of Jawaharlal Nehru, representing the left wing of the Indian National Congress, called the course to achieve a society based on the principle of continuity and the balance of change, its political program was even named the Neruvianism. It consists of supporting national entrepreneurship, protecting it from foreign competition, private sector state regulation, hard control of financial transactions, and, in the public sector, primary development of main heavy industry sectors.[vi]

However, if we are talking about strategic culture, we need to address the historical heritage of the heroic character whose images attract mass consciousness and the national leader’s thought. Therefore, it is necessary to note the central Indian epos, Mahabharata and Ramayana. The first is the story of the struggle between two clans and an eternal cycle of events where many things are already predetermined, and the second one is about the fight of the gods and their assistants against the demons. It is natural that, as the monuments of national literature, through folklore, celebrations and customs, these imperatives entered the life of the population and the elite. Moreover, the strategy development, especially in state governance and war waging, was affected by the famous work Arthashastra written by a famous Indian thinker Kautilya (IV-III c. BC), which served the interests of the Maurya dynasty. Many Indians and even foreign lawyers quote the book and as a model of pre-Roman legal norms code, the traditional law. According to US analyst Rodney Jones, who wrote a lot of works on the Indian strategy, trying to find out the Hindu code to the international relations lock, Kautilya’s advice to the governors consists of the detailed description of the correct usage of power, espionage and poisons (in modern time, it can be regarded as chemical, bacterial or nuclear weapons)[vii]. According to Kautilya, the region is to face military conflicts, therefore, it needs to be prepared for a plot twist and maybe create military alliances with other states. Naturally, in the XX century, Indian politicians took into account this factor too.

Jones himself is the president of the Policy Architects International Company, and before that he spent a lot of time visiting India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, as he was the son of Christian missionaries sent to the countries. In the USA, before establishing his company, Jones graduated from the Columbia University, and he worked as a professor at Kansas State University, and, in the mid-1970s, he carried out research at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked on the security issues in the Carter’s administration. In addition, he worked on arms control at Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International studies. So, in spite of its Western origin, it has in a sense taken his opinion into account.

Jones identifies a number of items that are in fact philosophical and mythological, but are the fundamentals for the strategic culture of India:

11. Actions have consequences; good intention does not justify offense

12. Standards of law prohibit conventional compromise (it is difficult to find the difference, though not mitigated with the quid pro quo)

13. Compromise can be easily mistaken for an internal loss (ephemeral, truth deformation, lack of sovereignty)

14. Confidence is correct knowledge and actions; it is impersonal and difficult to build or to fill in

15. Security is a sit-down (it covers the geographical situation or way of life)

16. Strategy is assimilating (external is changing, reality is constant).

Based on these provisions, Jones proposes to include such categories as war and peace when considering Indian policies. The conflict is directly related to the strategic culture, according to one of the authors of this concept, Alistair Johnston, and the answers on three important questions is at the center of it: war’s role in international relations, the enemies nature and the threats they may pose, and the use of force.[viii] Jones writes that since the 1960’s, India was preparing a defense on two fronts: against Pakistan and China.[ix] The author also notes that until January 2003, the Indian official policy on the use of nuclear weapons stated it is acceptable only if India does not fire first, it must be a response to an attack. This policy was based on India's nuclear doctrine, published in August 1999. However, in 2003, the “Implementation of the Indian nuclear doctrine” stated that nuclear weapons would be used if chemical or biological weapons are used against Indian troops, and, most importantly, even its troops are located outside the Indian territories.[x] The incident in Mumbai, when Islamic Terrorists had successfully crossed the Pakistan border and made a small "jihad" in the economic capital of India, forced the authorities to think about other measures of deterrence and control, including informational systems.

However, the Pakistan issue is more or less clear. The enemy image fits in this scheme: the Indian conquerors (I do not mean the mythical Aryan invasion, but a particular Muslim army that built in the the Mughal Empire north of India) came from the current northwest territories of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They had to fight and subdue not only the followers of Hinduism, but also by the adherents of the new syncretic monotheistic religion of the Sikhism, who have their sanctuary in the Golden temple dozens kilometers from the Pakistani border, in Amritsar. If the Muslims invaded Indian lands, the “white colonizers” arrived by sea: the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British controlled the south of Hindustan one after the other, exploiting its natural resources. The China issue is more complicated. Historically, Chinese emperors did not disturb the Indians because of the natural border, the Himalayan mountain range and the impenetrable jungle in the south. Although now India has several territorial disputes with China, or rather China has more claims on India, including the Tibetan Dalai Lama, whose headquarters where we takes shelter is located in the border region, Himachal Pradesh. India is more concerned about water resources: the sources of the Brahmaputra and the Ganga starts in Chinese Tibet.

However, in India there are different points of view on the problematic relations with its neighbors. Kanti Bajpai noted that after the end of the Cold War, India had three branches of possible strategic development. He calls them Nehruvianism, hyperrealism, and neo-liberalism. Bajpai insists that the hyperrealists have the most pessimistic view of international relations: “Where Nehruvians and neoliberals believe that international relations can be transformed either by means of communication and contact, or by free market economic reforms and the logic of comparative advantage, hyperrealists see an endless cycle of repetition in interstate interactions. In fact Hinduism regards time as an eternal cycle of sequences, human souls endures these too, continually reincarnating from one essence to another, thus Westerners - with their linear understanding of time - do not understand Indian sluggishness. Conflict and rivalry between states cannot be transformed into peace and friendship, except temporarily as in an alliance against a common foe, rather they can only be managed by the threat and use of violence.”[xi] In addition, hyperrealists reject their opponents’ objections to the unrestrained spending on weapons, and expressed doubt on the roles of institutions, laws and agreements. The IR-hyperrealists take into account only power and the strength; everything else is an illusion. Accordingly, the Nehruvianists and the neoliberalist regard war as one of the possibilities that can take place between sovereign states. For Nehruvianists, a natural state of anarchy can be reduced by agreements between states, so that war preparations to the point where the balance of power becomes a central factor of security and foreign policy are wasteful and useless. The neoliberals find that competitive arming, or arms races themselves, are a conditioning factor in the natural state of anarchy among the states, in particular, since they are interdependent. Therefore, they consider that economic strength is the primary goal for a state to be vital, which should be achieved through free markets and free trade abroad.[xii] The hyperrealists have quite a different point of view. Brahma Chellaney notes that war starts when adversaries determine that the other side has become too strong or too weak.[xiii] Therefore, war preparation is a responsible and wise perspicacity, not an instigation. Therefore, aggression against neighbors, if the issue is about a territorial dispute or any other contradictions, are considered not only acceptable, but even necessary by the hyperrealists.

So, you can extract some conclusions which are quite clear: the Indian hyperrealists can use external forces to justify the escalation of a conflict, while the Nehruvianists would try to reach a consensus, and the neoliberals would resolve issues from the pragmatic (economic) point of view. Russia has a significant advantage. It doesn’t have common borders with India, it has quite a good attitude toward it, that is based on historical experience. India, along with Russia, is part of BRICS, and is ready to participate in the development of new international rules. Russia can interact wisely with the representatives of all three branches of India's strategic culture. The hyperrealists will be extremely interested in Russian weapons, modernization programs and, generally, a wide range of military cooperation. In some cases, Russia can use smart power and send certain signals to countries like Pakistan and China, through the Indian hyperrealists. Parenthetically, Bangladesh and Nepal should not be taken into account, as they don’t have any effect on the regional balance of power. The neoliberal approach can be used from a purely pragmatic point of view: trade, economic, and industrial cooperation. Nuclear energy, as well as research and high-tech, including the aerospace industry, may be quite promising to Russia, and these interests are included in the Nehruvianists’ agenda.

In addition, India's strategic culture can give us another important lesson, which is their economic and market system. These are conducted in such a way that the majority of products and services are oriented towards the domestic consumer, so any financial catastrophe occurring in the external environment, and having a domino effect elsewhere, will not be disastrous for India. If Russia can use a reasonable approach to this issue, such a market model based on the autarky principle (self-sufficiency) may be used in a number of regions of the Russian Federation. On the other hand, external capital flows to India from migrant workers, who settled in other countries: the US, the UK, the Gulf, etc, creates an additional source of revenue for the state.

It should be noted that India is inclined to reconsider its strategies. We are not only talking about the military doctrine of the “Cold Start”, which was recently modified, but also about its strategic culture in general. The National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon, believes that it is important to develop a new “vocabulary” and concepts to resolve 19th century issues. According to him, due to the opportunities provided by growth in India, it needs to interact more with the Western world, but the main line of strategic culture of the country will remain unchanged, as it is “'an indigenous construct of over a millennium, modified considerably by our experiences over the last two centuries … Fortunately for us, there is no isolationist stream in our strategy”.[xiv]

jeudi, 22 février 2018

The very term “multipolarity” is of American (Anglo-Saxon) origin, and in the third chapter we examined similar concepts that have been developed in other countries. As various scholars have indicated, varying interpretations of multipolarity have provoked certain conceptual dilemmas. For instance, a report on long-term global trends prepared by the Zurich Center for Security Studies in 2012 noted that:

The advantage of ‘multipolarity’ is that it accounts for the ongoing diffusion of power that extends beyond uni-, bi-, or- tripolarity. But the problem with the term is that it suggests a degree of autonomy and separateness of each ‘pole’ that fails to do justice to the interconnections and complexities of a globalised world. The term also conceals that rising powers are still willing to work within the Westernshaped world economic system, at least to some extent. This is why the current state of play may be better described as ‘polycentric’. Unlike ‘multipolarity’, the notion of ‘polycentricism’ says nothing about how the different centres of power relate to each other. Just as importantly, it does not elicit connotations with the famous but ill-fated multipolar system in Europe prior to 1914 that initially provided for regular great power consultation, but eventually ended in all-out war. The prospects for stable order and effective global governance are not good today. Yet, military confrontation between the great powers is not a likely scenario either, as the emerging polycentric system is tied together in ways that render a degree of international cooperation all but indispensable.

The Swiss scholars involved in this summation approached the issue from the standpoint of reviewing security issues in a globalized world and tried to find an adequate expression for contemporary trends. However, there also exist purely technical approaches and ideological theories which employ the term “polycentric”.

The concept of “polycentricity” had been used before to describe the functioning of complex economic subjects. Accordingly, if management theories are springboards for geopolitical practice, then this model’s basic elaborations already exist. In a literal sense, the term “polycentric” suggests some kind of spatial unit with several centers. However, the term does not specify what kind of centers are in question, hence the obvious need to review various concepts and starting points before discussing polycentrism.

Four levels of this concept can be discussed in the context of political-administrative approaches. The analytical-descriptive level is needed for describing, measuring, and characterizing the current state of a spatial object by means of precisely determining how long a country or capital can be “polycentric.” Secondly, this concept can be understood in a normative sense which might help, for example, in reorganizing the spatial configuration of an object, i.e., either to promote/create polycentrism or support/utilize an existing polycentric structure. Thirdly, when it comes to spatial entities, it is necessary to specify their spatial scale, i.e., at the city level, city-region, mega-regional level, or even on the national or transnational levels. Upon closer examination, the concept of polycentrism concept thus challenges our understanding of centers in urban areas, since such can concern either their roles and functional ties (relations) or their concrete morphological forms (the structure of urban fabric). This differentiation between the functional and morphological understandings of polycentrism constitutes the fourth dimension.

In the contemporary situation which features the presence of city-states and megalopoli that can easily compete with some states in the classical understanding in the most varied criteria (number of residents and their ethnic identity, length of external borders, domestic GDP, taxes, industry, transport hubs, etc.), such an approach seems wholly appropriate for more articulated geopolitical analysis. Moreover, in the framework of federal models of state governance, polycentrism serves as a marker of complex relations between all administrative centers. Regional cooperation also fits into this model since it allows subjects to “escape” mandatory compliance with a single regulator, such as in the face of a political capital, and cooperate with other subjects (including foreign ones) within a certain space.

To some extent, the idea of polycentrism is reflected in offshore zones as well. While offshores can act as “black holes” for the economies of sovereign states, on the other hand, they can also be free economic zones removing various trade barriers clearly within the framework of the operator’s economic sovereignty.

It should also be noted that the theory of polycentrism is also well known in the form of the ideological contribution of the Italian community Palmiro Togliatti as an understanding of the relative characteristics of the working conditions facing communist parties in different countries following the de-Stalinization process in the Soviet Union in 1956. What if one were to apply such an analysis to other parties and movements? For example, in comparing Eurosceptics in the EU and the conglomerate of movements in African and Asian countries associated with Islam? Another fruitful endeavor from this perspective could be evaluating illiberal democracies and populist regimes in various parties of the world as well as monarchical regimes, a great variety of which still exist ranging from the United Kingdom’s constitutional monarchy to the hereditary autocracy of Saudi Arabia which appeared relatively recently compared to other dynastic forms of rule. Let us also note that since Togliatti the term “polycentrism” has become popular in political science, urban planning, logistics, sociology, and as an expression for unity in diversity.

In 1969, international relations and globalization expert Howard V. Perlmutter proposed the conceptual model of EPG, or Ethnocentrism-Polycentrism-Geocentrism, which he subsequently expanded with his colleague David A Heenan to include Regionalism. This model, famously known by the acronym EPRG, remains essential in international management and human resources. This theory posits that polycentrism, unlike ethnocentrism, regionalism, and geocentrism, is based on political orientation, albeit through the prism of controlling commodity-monetary flows, human resources, and labor. In this case, polycentrism can be defined as a host country’s orientation reflecting goals and objectives in relation to various management strategies and planning procedures in international operations. In this approach, polycentrism is in one way or another connected to issues of management and control.

However, insofar as forms of political control can differ, this inevitably leads to the understanding of a multiplicity of political systems and automatically rejects the monopoly of liberal parliamentarism imposed by the West as the only acceptable political system. Extending this approach, we can see that the notion of polycentrism, in addition to connoting management, is contiguous to theories of law, state governance, and administration. Canada for instance has included polycentricity in its administrative law and specifically refers to a “polycentric issue” as “one which involves a large number of interlocking and interacting interests and considerations.” For example, one of Canada’s official documents reads: “While judicial procedure is premised on a bipolar opposition of parties, interests, and factual discovery, some problems require the consideration of numerous interests simultaneously, and the promulgation of solutions which concurrently balance benefits and costs for many different parties. Where an administrative structure more closely resembles this model, courts will exercise restraint.”

Polycentric law became world-famous thanks to Professor Tom Bell who, as a student at the University of Chicago’s law faculty, wrote a book entitled Polycentric Law in which he noted that other authors use phrases such as “de-monopolized law” to describe polycentric alternatives.

Bell outlined traditional customary law (also known as consolamentum law) before the establishment of states and in accordance with the works of Friedrich A. Hayek, Bruce L. Benson, and David D. Friedman. Bell mentioned the customary law of the Anglo-Saxons, ecclesiastical law, guild law, and trade law as examples of polycentric law. On this note, he suggests that customary and statutory law have co-existed throughout history, an example being Roman law being applied to Romans throughout the Roman Empire at the same time as indigenous peoples’ legal systems remained permitted for non-Romans.

Polycentric theory has also attracted the interest of market researchers, especially public economists. Rather paradoxically, it is from none other than ideas of a polycentric market that a number of Western scholars came to the conclusion that “Polycentricity can be utilized as a conceptual framework for drawing inspiration not only from the market but also from democracy or any other complex system incorporating the simultaneous functioning of multiple centers of governance and decision making with different interests, perspectives, and values.” In our opinion, it is very important that namely these three categories - interests, perspectives, and values - were distinguished. “Interests” as a concept is related to the realist school and paradigm in international relations, while “perspectives” suggests some kind of teleology, i.e., a goal-setting actor, and “values” are associated with the core of strategic culture or what has commonly been called the “national idea,” “cultural-historical traditions”, or irrational motives in the collective behavior of a people. For a complex society inhabited by several ethnic groups and where citizens identify with several religious confessions, or where social class differences have been preserved (to some extent they continue to exist in all types of societies, including in both the US and North Korea, but are often portrayed as between professional specialization or peculiarities of local stratification), a polycentric system appears to be a natural necessity for genuinely democratic procedures. In this context, the ability of groups to resolve their own problems on the basis of options institutionally included in the mode of self-government is fundamental to the notion of polycentrism.

Only relatively recently has polycentrism come to be used as an anti-liberal or anti-capitalist platform. In 2006, following the summit of the World Social Forum in Caracas, Michael Blanding from The Nation illustrated a confrontation between “unicentrism” characterized by imperial, neo-liberal, and neo-conservative economic and political theories and institutions, and people searching for an alternative, or adherents of “polycentrism.” As a point of interest, the World Social Forum itself was held in a genuinely polycentric format as it was held not only in Venezuela, but in parallel also in Mali and Pakistan. Although the forum mainly involved left socialists, including a large Trotskyist lobby (which is characteristic of the anti-globalist movement as a whole), the overall critique of neoliberalism and transnational corporations voiced at the forum also relied on rhetoric on the rights of peoples, social responsibility, and the search for a political alternative. At the time, this was manifested in Latin America in the Bolivarian Revolution with its emphasis on indigenism, solidarity, and anti-Americanism.

It should be noted that Russia’s political establishment also not uncommonly uses the word “polycentricity” - sometimes as a synonym for multipolarity, but also as a special, more “peace-loving” trend in global politics insofar as “polarity presumes the confrontation of poles and their binary opposition.” Meanwhile, Russian scholars recognize that comparing the emerging polycentric world order to historical examples of polycentricity is difficult. Besides the aspect of deep interdependence, the polycentricity of the early 21st century possesses a number of different, important peculiarities. These differences include global asymmetry insofar as the US still boasts overwhelming superiority in a number of fields, and a multi-level character in which there exist: (1) a military-diplomatic dimension of global politics with the evolution of quickly developing giant states; (2) an economic dimension with the growing role of transnational actors; (3) global demographic shifts; (4) a specific space representing a domain of symbols, ideals, and cultural codes and their deconstructions; and (5) a geopolitical and geo-economic level.

Here it is necessary to note that the very term “polycentricity” in itself harbors some interesting connotations. Despite being translated to mean “many”, the first part (“poly-“) etymologically refers to both “pole” and “polis” (all three words are of Ancient Greek origin), and the second part presupposes the existence of centers in the context of international politics, i.e., states or a group of states which can influence the dynamic of international relations.

In his Parmenides, Martin Heidegger contributed an interesting remark in regards to the Greek term “polis”, which once again confirms the importance and necessity of serious etymological analysis. By virtue of its profundity, we shall reproduce this quote in full:

Πόλις is the πόλоς, the pole, the place around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in a peculiar way. The pole is the place around which all beings turn and precisely in such a way that in the domain of this place beings show their turning and their conditions. The pole, as this place, lets beings appear in their Being and show the totality of their condition. The pole does not produce and does not create beings in their Being, but as pole it is the abode of the unconsciousness of beings as a whole. The πόλις is the essence of the place [Ort], or, as we say, it is the settlement (Ort-schaft) of the historical dwelling of Greek humanity. Because the πόλις lets the totality of beings come in this or that way into the unconcealedness of its condition, the πόλις is therefore essentially related to the Being of beings. Between πόλις and “Being” there is a primordial relation.

Heidegger thus concludes that “polis” is not a city, state, nor a combination of the two, but the place of the history of the Greeks, the focus of their essence, and that there is a direct link between πόλις and ἀλήθεια (this Greek word is usually translated into Russian as “truth”) Thus, in order to capture polycentricity, one needs to search for the foci and distribution areas of the essence of the numerous peoples of our planet. Here we can once again mention strategic cultures and their cores.

jeudi, 23 novembre 2017

U.S. conspiracy theories and the American mentality

History shows an increased interest in American society in conspiracy theories, no matter who is represented as the conspirator.

While there are a lot of various extravagant theories in the United States, among which we can find a fantastic story, for example, that the country's leadership are either aliens or reptilians. There is an historical continuity, which confirms that the American consciousness, whether being of the middle class, farmers and influential political circles, are deeply permeated with the idea of the conspiracy.

For example, with their conspirological mentality, Democrats and globalists gave recent statements that Russia had carried out regular hacker attacks, and that this had even affected the outcome of the election campaign in the United States. Political scientists and experts from various American think tanks try to give pseudoscientific data declarations that come from the senior management of the country. Similar operations were being held in relation to other states and even non-state actors, who caused suspicion for unknown reasons among the American establishment (Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Hezbollah, the institution of Ayatollahs, the Russian Orthodox Church, Communists, right-wing parties in Europe and so on).

History of the conspiracy theory in the US

This tradition began to come into being in the United States in the wake of the exclusion of former colonists from the British metropolis. In addition, the powerful stimulus to look at the causal relationships from the perspective of possible conspiracies was the idea of the enlightenment, related to desacralization and attributing all actions exclusively to human will.

Initially, the search for conspiracies with the following “witch-hunt” were peculiar to Western Europe, where, in the Middle Ages, the Inquisition was raging, and the Renaissance palace intrigues had become the norm. In Britain (where the United States largely borrowed this conspiracy tradition) there were a lot of talks about French, Irish, Jacobite and Catholic conspiracies and real attempts to organize a coup or an attack on the government. Only they confirmed rumors that such evil plans did really exist. For example, the failed plan was to blow up the Parliament, masterminded by Guy Fawkes.

According to Gordon Wood, “by the 18th century the conspiracy had become not simply a means of explaining how the rulers were overthrown; it became a commonly used tool for an explanation of how the rulers and the others who controlling political developments acted in real life”.2

Since the Renaissance, God was being gradually squeezed out of the social and political life, so the control of all processes (and promises about domain over natural elements in the future) was assigned to a person. Such a mechanistic paradigm reduced all human actions solely to purposes and motives.

Now everything was conceived in the human mind, and depended on these moral norms, prejudices and beliefs. Therefore, all social processes began to come to reflect individual passions and interests.

Some called for a curbing of these passions by offering a specific plan of socio-political activity, naturally offering themselves to manage these plans, while those first attempting to usurp power were blamed for trying to instill tyranny and oppression.

In this context, the work “the Paranoid Style in American Politics” of Columbia University Professor Richard Hofstadter3 is very interesting, where he shows that a whole generation of Americans thought in terms of conspiracies throughout the US history. In this article, firstly published in 1964, Richard Hofstadter noted: “The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor”.4

American historian James Hutson considers American behavior in general as a product manifesting out of envy and suspicion towards the government power.

At the same time he pointed out that the fear of abusing political power led to the American conspiracy being viewed as “completely trustworthy”, at least until about the 1830's. Thereafter, attention was switched over to non-governmental organizations and groups such as the Masons, and the Roman Catholic Church.5 In the 19th century fears of various conspiracies united many groups in the United States. If Abraham Lincoln believed in imaginary subversive activities, then what could be the problem if an anti-Masonic league or some protestant denominations do? At the same time, protestants found the personification of the work of the devil and all sorts of dark forces directly in political activities both inside the US and abroad. Certainly, the rational explanation for this phenomenon could be found in linking this fear with some symptoms of severe social and psychological overload, in which American society was at that period of time.6

The 20th century and the new myths

The twentieth century has also been full of the conspiracy theories. At the beginning of the century, specific fears in the United States were associated with Germany, the Russian Empire, and China. It would be enough just to mention the book of Brooks Adams “The New Empire”, published in 1902, where he was talking about the need to avoid combining the interests of Russia, Germany and China.7

The situation with the Russian Empire was particularly complex because of the passport issue, which led in 1911 to the break of the US Russian-American treaty of commerce and navigation of 1832. This happened under the influence of the Jewish lobby in the US, which from the second half of the 19th century were actively defending the rights of European and Russian Jews. Naturally, such influential organizations, not without the involvement of big business - in particular money of Jacob Schiff from the American Jewish Committee - which funded the anti-Russian campaign in the media and even blackmailed President Taft, because they could force the country's leadership to meet their demands, automatically fell into the category of 'plotters' in the eyes of American citizens who had no connection with these lobby groups.8

The era of the Great Depression sharply polarized the American society, while Hollywood and its establishment were trying to project their vision of solving problems. Depending on the place of residence and social status, American citizens found their own “scapegoats” in the face of Republicans, bankers, speculator migrants. However, religious preachers thought that the cause of crop failure for several years was the scourge of God, fallen upon the American people for their sins.

Before the Second World War there was a peculiar suspicion among the military and political leadership towards Japan, although at the beginning of the century the United States supported this country during the conflict with Russia.

The era of McCarthyism was a well-known as "witch hunt", but here women were pursued for their difficult to prove relationship with the evil spirit, and those sympathetic to communist ideas. These facts were imposed on the racial issues in the United States and in its broader ideological confrontation.

The murder of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the emergence of AIDS, global warming, the role of the Trilateral Commission in the international economy, all such cases necessarily were always considered from the perspective of conspiracy theory. Accordingly, within the framework of conspiracy thinking, the murders were implemented or adjusted by CIA agents, doctors commissioned by the federal government developed the deadly virus (this issue was further developed and enriched with new facts and speculations), and the broader phenomena was considered as a kind of cover-up and supporting interests of large companies and lobby groups.

However, the Watergate scandal confirmed that the Republicans were really behind the organization of wiretapping in the room where the Democrats held their talks. In the 50's of the last century the CIA really conducted the experiment MKULTRA, where LSD and other narcotic drugs were administered to subjects in order to obtain “mind control”.9 The US Ministry of Defence plan for Operation Northwoods is also well-known to have been against Cuba in order to organize provocations with further military aggression in the Isla de la Juventud.10

The incident in Roswell (New Mexico) in 1947 is a peculiar episode. According to the official version, aliens landed, and the US government was keeping this information in secret.

Moreover, the publication of declassified documents from both official sources such as the State Department, the Defense Department, the FBI and the CIA, as well as documents of various international groups such as Bilderberg Club and the Club of Rome, show that certain secret plans on various issues were developed and implemented in reality.

In recent years, the most common topics in the United States related to conspiracies, have become the attacks of September 11th, 2001 (9/11, Truth Movement), the influence of the neo-conservatives in the adoption of decisions on the invasion in Iraq in 2003, as well as any facts concerning the corporate influence and the US military-industrial complex. Certainly, some leakage, spread with the help of the resource WikiLeaks, provide additional ground for the circulation of the view that the US establishment holds some secret game and does not work in the interest of the American society, but supply various financial and industrial groups with their preferences.

Neoliberals’ fears and manipulations

The scandals connected with the financing of Hillary Clinton's campaign, Clinton family ties with all sorts of fund structures and involvement in dubious projects have also shown that in some organizations, the real purposes significantly are at odds with the stated principles. However, in recent years no one is surprised with such level of the corruption, especially since in the US lobbying has become protected by the law.

As these cases are also falling into the categories of the conspiracy theory, representatives of the scientific community in the US, which are connected with the policy, conduct some attempts to present the conspiracy as a “sub broad category of false beliefs”. For example, Cass R. Sunstein pointed it out in his scientific publication, published in 2008, under the auspices of Harvard and Chicago University (Law & Economics Research Paper Series Paper No. 387)11.

To make a following clarification is necessary. Cass R. Sunstein is an American lawyer and scholar, a member of the Democratic Party. In 2008, he actively opposed the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton. He served as administrator of the Information and Regulatory Policy in the White House in 2008 – 2012. Cass R. Sunstein is also a developer of the theory of “Nudge”, the latest trend in behavioral sociology of the USA.12 The main idea of which is that people can be directed to carry out any action. But at the same time, they need to consider this “boost”, as their own decision. To do this it is necessary to create the appearance of alternative choices. Precisely because of Sunstein’s theory Barack Obama signed a decree on the application of behavioral science methods in the public administration and domestic policy, on September 15th.

It was significant that Sunstein treated the possible causes of the conspiracy theory in his own way. At the same time he provides the link to the work of Richard Hofstadter, where he was warned that his proposed "paranoid style" did not refer to psychological abnormalities and diseases, and expressed the social phenomenon.

Obviously Sunstein commissioned by the government to co-author articles suggest measures to counter the conspiracy theories: “We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help." However, the authors advocate that each "instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).”13

This article was severely criticized by the United States scientific community.

But there is no doubt that the interest to the conspiracy has remained at a fairly high level in the corridors of American power. The question is how to apply and manipulate information according to the interests of the White House.

And Donald Trump’s victory also showed that conspiracy theories were strong enough within the US society. But now the liberals are looking for those responsible within the United States (the right-wing or the conservatives), and outside, in the attempt to accuse Russia of hacking attacks and manipulation of the public opinion.

Conspiracy theories will continue to affect average Americans, as well as decision making at the highest levels.

jeudi, 31 décembre 2015

Lex Pluriversalis - foundation for next world order

Presently there is a situation when mutually exclusive phenomena, such as the erosion of statehood through the reduction or disappearance of sovereignty, and the attempt to develop new rules for international relations, impose one on the other. The paradox is that international law is based on the concept of sovereignty, and if someone tries to introduce new definitions or concepts, it simply means that the sovereignty of one or some actors dominates over the others. Therefore, this is what the United States is doing in trying to introduce the matrix of Anglo-Saxon law at the international level. However, all legal systems in the world, as well as the 'sense of justice', are rooted in national traditions, and they react differently to the existing reality. If Colin Gray said that the military strategy depends on the culture of the people, although it is not that obvious, in this case the situation is the same: religion, history, and philosophy of the people forms the 'sense of justice' that influences collective behavior, including those relating to the interaction with other peoples. Now we have a situation where peoples' 'sense of justice' is different from the enforcement, in other words, the implementation of the legal regulations that often do not correspond to their material and spiritual needs. The European Union is a typical example. Traditionally, Europe has Continental law, based largely in Roman legislation. Carl Schmitt and other classical theorists wrote numerous works on the subject. The second major legal system is Anglo-Saxon Common Law. This is not based in the right of principles, rather it is based in the right of precedent, and legal experts; which comes from England and then took root in the United States, and from there spread to the countries of the English-speaking world; now we have the attempt to make this become universal. It is assumed that the roots of the differences between these systems are in a different understanding of justice and values. Although Max Weber noted the Protestant influence on modern capitalism (opposed to the Catholic tradition), there are more profound differences between the two legal systems. Looking at the roots of differences will naturally raise the question about the influences of the traditions from other regions traditions such as Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, polytheism, Taoism, African cults and pre-Columbian traditions of Latin America. Islamic law is not connected only with notorious Sharia law and Madhhab, but also with local traditions that differ in the North Caucasus, North Africa, Indonesia and Iran. However, even with the “emasculation” of religions of the modern era, we can find rudiments of Roman law that were broken under the influence of regional cultures and eras. While in the US you can constantly hear the appeal to God and Christianity, the moral and ethical complex in that country is significantly different from similar ones in Latin America that had the same rudiments of Roman law, but combined with the influence of Catholicism. Now, the expansion of Common Law continues at the global level, so-called Common Space: the air, the sea, the space, the cyberspace. It seems a little bit strange that the initiative to establish control over the spheres comes from a country that has not signed a number of important documents on sailing, on space (the US denied the initiative of Russia and other countries to ban the use of weapons in outer space), as well as on new artificial space, cyberspace. On the other hand, we see an attempt to preserve sovereignty with compulsory control over the mentioned spaces, if they are under state jurisdiction. However, these efforts, taking into account the influence of the globalization process, can be wasted or even destructive for the countries themselves. The only way out of the situation is a civilizational approach, based on alliances of culturally close countries of a certain region. Such unions should be formed on the principle of voluntariness (Bona fides), and understanding the necessity of long-term cooperation. The current economic and political partnerships are likely to be transformed due to the specifics of transitivity. Famous scholar Roland Benedikter warns that a seven-dimensional global systemic shift is underway, which is related to the three epoch-making ends: – New World Order (changes in the politics of the US unipolar hegemony creating multipolarity, backed by Russia, China, India and others actors); – Neoliberalism (in the economy, which is characterized by the 2008 global financial crisis); – Postmodernism (in culture). The three ends are directly connected with 4) global Renaissance of Religion (which becomes politicized), 5) Technology and 6) Demography that is shown by the global migration flows. As the result, we have a seventh point: changes in the order structure of the entire social system. To make these changes with as few problems as possible, it is necessary to implement new approaches to international law, as soon as possible, to limit the spread of the Anglo-Saxon legal model which claims to be global and universal. Proposed alternative must be on pluriversal basis that respect local traditions and may be implemented on the planetary level too.

mercredi, 02 avril 2014

The Dark Side of Globalization

Despite the fact that research on globalization has been ongoing for decades, a clear definition of the phenomenon, accepted by the entire international scientific community does not exist. Further, it is not possible to think about globalization in only one particular field of science or discipline in isolation, because of its interconnected and complex nature.

Axel Dreher has proposed looking globalization in three ways:

- Economic globalization: characterized by the long-distance flow of goods, capital, and services, as well as the information and perceptions that accompany these market exchanges

- Political globalization: characterized by a diffusion of government policies

- Social globalization: expressed as the spread of ideas, information, images, and people[1].

UNESCO’s 2001 Annual Report states that, “globalization can be defined as a set of economic, social, technological, political and cultural structures and processes arising from the changing character of the production, consumption and trade of goods and assets that comprise the base of the international political economy”[2].

Promoters of globalization share many common perceptions.

Zygmunt Bauman, for example, attempts to determine the mechanisms of interaction between states and nations, proposing a transformation from existing “inter-national” organizations to what he sees as truly universal and global institutions. He no longer has any interest in the social institution of the ‘state’, but, instead, envisions a ‘social planet’[3]. Many others scholars and politicians who similarly promote globalization in its current form are full of joy and optimism about the future. However, some critique is required for an objective assessment of the phenomenon.

Jacques Derrida said many years ago that the ideal or euphoric image of globalization as a process of opening the borders that makes the world more homogeneous must be challenged with absolute seriousness and vigilance. Not only because this homogenization, where it was made in reality or assumption has both positive and negative sides, but also because any apparent homogenization often hides the old or new forms of social inequality or hegemony. Josef Stiglitz, who has been intimately involved in the globalization process from within, has also produced numerous works critiquing globalization since leaving the World Bank.

As a whole, the process of globalization is very abstract, and so requires an assessment from within and between various discrete fields of the social sciences. David Harvey notes that “…if the word ‘globalization’ signifies anything about our recent historical geography, it is most likely to be a new phase of exactly the same underlying process of the capitalist production of space”[4]. Anthony G. McGrew , a professor of International Relations at Southampton University, describes globalization as “a process which generates flows and connections, not simply across nation-states and national territorial boundaries, but between global regions, continents and civilizations. This invites a definition of globalization as: ‘an historical process which engenders a significant shift in the spatial reach of networks and systems of social relations to transcontinental or interregional patterns of human organization, activity and the exercise of power”[5].

It’s very important to note that in many definitions of globalization we can see the primacy of economics, particularly of neoliberal capitalism, as well as the distribution of power that thus flows and its influence worldwide. Faster, more flexible and more robust nodes of such economic power have an advantage in spreading their own flows of the production and exchange of ideas and knowledge, in effect, a normative and reality-defining process. They make globalization in their own image.

It is also necessary to understand the hybrid nature of globalization, comprising a global market economy, technological development, and societal transformation and global homogenization.

David Steingard and Dale Fitzgibbons, in a scholarly critique of global capitalism as driving the process of globalization, defined globalization “as an ideological construct devised to satisfy capitalism’s need for new markets and labour sources and propelled by the uncritical ‘sycophancy’ of the international academic business community"[6]. However, globalization has also been conceived as a discursive practice. In this sense, it is not the result of ‘real’ forces of markets and technology, but rather is a rhetorical and discursive construct, formed by practices and ideologies which some groups are imposing on others for political and economic gain[7]. Globally prestigous educational institutions, such as Harvard , the LSE, and Colombia University are incubators for a transnational political and economic elite institutionalized with a neoliberal ideological agenda. Thus they provide neoliberalism as the driving and defining force of globalization with ‘intellectual legitimacy’ and an academic facade.

New possibilities to communicate faster and network with more people are not only good for personal and professional interrelations, but sharing and collaboration on scientific experiments, academics, lessons learned, and best practices. In this sense, “globalization must be understood as the condition whereby localizing strategies become systematically connected to global concerns…Thus, globalization appears as a dialectical (and therefore contradictory) process: what is being globalized is the tendency to stress ‘locality’ and ‘difference’, yet ‘locality’ and ‘difference’ presuppose the very development of worldwide dynamics of institutional communication and legitimation”[8].

In parallel of globalization it can be noted that, “broad economic, technological, and scientific trends that directly affect higher education and are largely inevitable in the contemporary world. These phenomena include information technology in its various manifestations, the use of a common language for scientific communication, and the imperatives of society’s mass demand for higher education…”[9].

In other words, new scientific language promoted by winners of

globalization level the cultural differences and undermine traditional and regional aspects which include, but are not limited to religious, historical, cultural and philosophical features of the world's peoples. It can also be said that globalization through the exchange of ideas also threatens the institution of the sovereign state. How? Both the independent exchange of ideas and the formal institution of public education is key not just for human development, but for the institutionalization, norm creation, and legitimacy formation of the state. People, as ‘human capital, are developed and utilized by the modern state as any other natural resource at its disposal.[10]. If a government is not involved in the process of public and special education, there are external powers that will act to fill this void. As result, the human capital potential and stability of any given state will be decreased.

We can also attempt to see this aspect of hegemony from other cultures’ point of view. The process of globalization suggests simultaneously two images of culture. “The first image entails the extension outwards of a particular culture to its limit, the globe. Heterogeneous cultures become incorporated and integrated into a dominant culture which eventually covers the whole world. The second image points to the compression of cultures. Things formerly held apart are now brought into contact and juxtaposition”[11].

I do not think it controversial to characterize the current globally dominant culture as a mass-pseudo-ersatz culture produced in the U.S. and promoted by worldwide consumerism as the fruit of liberal ideology.

Liberalism itself is a synthetic creation of the Western-dominated global power structure, a humanitarian facade behind which the dirty work of policing the world can go on uninterrupted by idealistic spasms in the body politic[12]. So in a radical sense “globalization is what we in the Third World have for several centuries called colonization”[13].

Finally, we come to the question of values. Globalization is occuring in a paradigm of post-modern values[14]. In this way it rejects traditional values and traditional education systems, because the logic of postmodernism is the absence of a center, absolute principle. It a priori is prejudiced against all other cultures and ideas, and, as well, for the carriers of these ideas. It seeks to reduce to all other cultures to a hollow and harmless caricature and cliché that can be easily digested and regurgitated within the context of global consumer culture. It is impossible for the dominant global neoliberal culture to co-exist and harmonize with traditional cultures and create an artificial single type of global citizenship without essential damage to these peoples and societies. Thus globalization becomes a process of cultural destruction and forced homogenization.

The only way to remedy the process of globalization is the leveling of the disparity of global power and the establishment of a new international order based on genuine multipolarity, where will be several civilizations centers capable of projecting power regionally. This will preserve civilization-based cultural and educational-scientific paradigms, connected with the peoples’ will, values, and heritage, yet at the same time remain open to international cooperation and discourse, but built on a platform of trust, mutual aid, respect for cultural difference, and of the right for each societies own historical and developmental path looking to the future.

In Russia we can see the beginning of some attempts to theorize and build the precursors of a new system of education as an answer to the dark miracles of postmodernism. Professor Alexander Dugin from Moscow State University has proposed the idea of a Eurasian educational framework that reflects the contemporary global situation and interdependence of countries and nations, as well as recognizing the necessity to keep our traditions alive and to protect our peoples from the creative destruction promoted by Western liberalism.

Joint efforts with scholar, experts, analysts and activists from Third and Second World as well as academic critics from core of industrial developed countries known as founders of contemporary neo-liberalism and capitalism itself will be very useful for first steps to draw new scientific paradigm and basis for non-western international relations that will promote to establish Newest and more adequate World System than actual one.

[9] Philip G. Altbach, “Globalization and the University: Realities in an Unequal World”, Occasional Papers on Globalization, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2005, Globalization Research Center, University of South Florida, see http://www.cas.usf.edu/globalresearch/PDFs/Altbach.pdf.

[10] Volker H. Schmidt. Modernity, East Asia’s modernization and the New World Order

[13] J. A. Scholte, “The Globalization of World Politics”, in J. Baylis and S. Smith (eds.), The Globalization of World Politics, An Introduction to International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 15.

mercredi, 02 octobre 2013

Georges Sorel divided social and political formations into two types: (1) those which had a myth as the basis for their ideology, and (2) those which appealed to utopian ideas. The first category he attributed to revolutionary socialism, where the true revolutionary myths are not descriptions of phenomena, but the expression of human will. The second category is utopian projects, which he attributed to bourgeois society and capitalism.

In contrast to myth, with its irrational attitudes, utopia is a product of mental labor. According to Sorel, it is the work of theorists who are trying to create a model with which to critique existing society and to measure the good and evil within it. Utopia is a set of imaginary institutions, but also offers plenty of clear analogies to real institutions.

Myths urge us to fight, whereas utopia aims at reform. It is no accident that some utopians after gaining political experience often become adroit statesmen.

Myth cannot be refuted, since it is held in concert as a belief of the community and is thus irreducible. Utopias, however, can be considered and rejected.

As we know, the various forms of socialism, both on the left and right of the political spectrum were actually built on myths, as readily evidenced in their advocate’s works. It is sufficient to recall the Myth of the 20th Century by Alfred Rosenberg, who became an apologist for German National Socialism.

At the opposite end of socialism we also see a mythological basis, although it is analyzed post-facto. Even while Marx said that the proletariat does not need myths that are destroyed by capitalism, Igor Shafarevich conclusively demonstrated the link of the eschatological expectations of early Christianity and socialism. Liberation Theology in Latin America also confirms the strong presence of myth at work within left socialism of the 21st century.

If we talk in terms of the second and third political theories that have struggled with liberalism, it is pertinent to recall the remark of Friedrich von Hayek, who in his work The Road to Serfdom notes that, “in February 1941, Hitler felt it appropriate to say in a public speech that National Socialism and Marxism are basically the same thing.”

Of course, this does not diminish the importance of modern political myth, and also explains the hatred of it exhibited by the representatives of modern liberalism. Thus, political alternatives—whether the New Right, Indigenism, or Eurasianism—present a new totalitarian threat for neoliberals. Liberals, both classic and neo-, deny us our ideals, because they think they are largely mythological in character and thus cannot be translated into reality.

Now back to utopia. Liberal political economy, as rightly noted by Sorel, is, itself, one of the best examples of utopian thought. All human relationships are reduced to the form of free market exchange. This economic reductionism is presented by liberal utopians as a panacea for conflicts, misunderstandings, and all sorts of distortions that arise in societies.

The doctrine of utopianism emerged from the works of Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, Thomas More, and Jonathan Swift, as well as philosophers-liberals such as the leader of the British radicals Jeremy Bentham. The embodiment of utopia was erected at first on a rigid regulatory policy, which, at the same time included violence as a form of coercion on its citizens. It then switched to colonial expansion, which allowed for the accumulation of capital and the establishment of a single so-called “civilized standard” for other countries. Then liberal utopianism went even farther, becoming, in the words of Bertram Gross, “friendly fascism,” in that it started to institutionalize dominance and hegemony through a regime of international law and regulations. By this time, liberal utopia has itself become a modern myth: technocentric, rational, and totalitarian—emasculating the first utopian idea of ​​a just society and replacing it with materialism and utilitarian law, becoming, in effect, a dystopia.

In the case of both myth-centric societies, and utopias, consistently implemented through experiments with law, economics, philosophy, and politics, there was a major mistake in trying to extend the model globally. Fascism and Marxism fell first historically. However, liberalism has also now been called into question, as presciently noted about 20 years ago by John Lukacs in his work The End of the 20th Century and the End of the Modern Era.

Myth and utopia both drew their strength from the pluriversal world, homogenizing it and destroying its wealth of cultures and worldviews. The pluriversum was the basis on which the superstructure of Utopia was formed. It also where certain modern forces that aimed at implementing violent historical projects drew upon mythological deep mythological layers.

Within pluriversal reality there is space both for myth and utopia, if they are limited to a certain spaces with unique civilizational characteristics and separated from each other by geographical boundaries. Myth can be realized in the form of a theocracy or a futurological empire. Utopia could at the same time strive towards a biopolitical technopolis or a melting pot of the nations, but of course separately from myth-centric orders.

Carl Schmitt suggested the construction and recognition of such self-contained “Big Political Spaces” or Grossraume. The formation of these spaces would require a global program of pluriversalism, appealing to the distinctive myths and cultural foundations of different peoples. But all parties to a pluriversal order must have one thing in common as a prerequisite: the deconstruction of the superstructure of the nascent neoliberal utopia.

mercredi, 28 août 2013

Selective Jihad

The sudden intensification of the conflict between members of two Islamic sects – Sunni and Shi’ite – in several Middle Eastern countries at once suggests that it is not a question of a spontaneous outbreak of hostility, but rather the targeted fomentation of artificially-created antagonisms.

Al-Qaeda is intentionally blowing up Shi’ite shrines in Iraq and buses full of pilgrims from Iran, provoking acts of aggression towards Sunnis (so far largely unsuccessfully). The latest large-scale acts of terrorism took place on 20 and 27 May in Baghdad and its suburbs, populated by Shi’ite Muslims, in which more than 200 people were killed and 624 injured. (1) In response, Shi’ites have started to take drastic action. This could lead to an escalation of the conflict (which is what the organisers of the provocation are hoping for) if the government of al-Maliki does not suppress the wave of violence. Nevertheless, the American Institute for the Study of War is already predicting that hostilities between the two branches of Islam may plunge the whole region into bloody chaos (2).

In Lebanon, skirmishes are taking place between various armed groups who are carrying out attacks on government buildings. Here, Shi’ite Hezbollah has declared that Al-Qaeda is the main target of its attacks. In a recent interview, the head of the Christian Lebanese party «Levant», Rodrigue Khoury, reported that «at the call of Salafi cleric Ahmed al-Assir, who is in hiding, large numbers of Salafis are going out onto the streets of Lebanon and threatening Christians..., and according to Islamic beliefs, there is only one possible punishment for an «unbeliever» – his death». (3) According to Khoury, Salafis also want to take revenge for 2007, when Lebanese Armed Forces suppressed an uprising by Wahhabi terrorists at the Nahr El-Bared refugee camp. Lately, however, Salafi activity has been observed in Saida, where there are a large number of extremists in Palestinian refugee camps.

In Syria, the Alawite minority are being subjected to systematic attacks along with the government (the Alawites are regarded as an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam).

It is perhaps only in Iran that an atmosphere of tolerance between Muslims belonging to different Islamic sects is being maintained; there, the Sunni are able to pray quietly in Shi’ite mosques and, generally speaking, good will towards members of other religions is also being maintained.

86-year old Islamic theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi from Qatar, who spent a long time living in the US and was a trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston, is playing a major role in fuelling the conflict between Sunni and Shi’ite. Al-Qaradawi is a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, al-Qaradawi’s TV programme «Sharia and life», which is broadcast by the TV channel «Al-Jazeera», has an audience of 60 million people. (4)

Al-Qaradawi instils the idea that Russia is an enemy of the Arabs and of all Muslims, while at the same time calling for a war against the current regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. On 31 May 2013, speaking in Doha, al-Qaradawi declared: «Everyone who has the ability and has training to kill ... is required to go. I am calling for Muslims to go and support their brothers in Syria» (5).

Hamas, which has announced its support of Syrian rebels, regarded al-Qaradawi’s visit to the Gaza Strip in May 2013 as «a hugely important and significant event», and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh called al-Qaradawi «the grand imam of modern Islam and the grand imam of the Arab Spring». Fatah’s reaction to the imam’s visit to the Gaza Strip, on the other hand, was distinctly negative, observing that he is causing a schism in the Palestinian people. Sure enough, the completely opposing reaction of the two wings of the Palestinian movement to al-Qaradawi’s propaganda is one of the signs that there is such a schism.

Al-Qaradawi’s intolerance when it comes to Jews is well-known: he believes that the State of Israel does not have the right to exist and refused to take part in the Inter-Religious Conference in Doha in April 2013 because Jewish delegates were also in attendance.

A characteristic detail: in 2009, al-Qaradawi published a book entitled Fiqh of Jihad in which he refused to recognise the duty of Muslims to wage jihad in Palestine, which is being occupied by Israel, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are being subjected to American occupation. At the same time, however, he is calling for a «holy war» in Syria against Bashar al-Assad’s government!

In recent days, the development of events in the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict has begun to resemble a chain reaction. Shortly after al-Qaradawi’s speech in the Gaza Strip, Saudi Arabia’s Chief Mufti, Sheikh Abdul-Aziz, publicly supported the Qatar Sheikh’s argument that «Hezbollah is the party of Satan». A week later, a group of Muslim clerics in Yemen issued a fatwa calling for «protection of the oppressed» in Syria, and then in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saud al-Shuraim declared that it was the duty of every believer to support Syrian rebels «by any means possible».

According to the American magazine Foreign Affairs, since the beginning of the conflict, 5,000 Sunni militants from more than 60 countries have taken part in military actions in Syria. If this figure is true, it means that Syria has become the second Muslim country after Afghanistan where such a large amount of foreign mercenaries have fought against the existing government alongside Muslims.

Returning to the activities of the Qatar cleric during his time in the US when he was a trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston, it is worth remembering that back in 1995, while speaking before a group of Arab Muslim youths in the state of Ohio, this herald of jihad declared: «We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America!»... (6)

One inevitably starts to think about the words of the famous Muslim scholar Imran Nazar Hosein (7), who visited Moscow last week and considers the outburst of violence between Muslim Sunni and Muslim Shi’ite currently being witnessed as the implementation of some master plan being put into operation by what the scholar referred to as «evil forces».

samedi, 29 juin 2013

Africa in the Context of BRICS and Geopolitical Turbulence

by Leonid SAVIN

Ex: http://www.geopolitica.ru/

After the terrorist attacks on the WTC in New York, the US began to implement a new foreign policy vision and strategy for global order. Its elements synchronized with the doctrine of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ that was detailed in the 1996 Defense Department policy directive “Joint Vision 2010”[1]. In accordance with this concept, US armed forces should be "persuasive in peace, decisive in war, pre-eminent in any form of conflict"[2]. The militarization of the Africa continent is to be conducted hand-in-hand with the exploitation of African resources by Western corporate interests. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11th 2001 opened US eyes to the strategic advantage of creating a relatively ‘safer’ West and West-Central African, in particular Nigeria, whose sources of high quality crude oil are rapidly transportable across the Atlantic Ocean to refineries in populous cities on the North American eastern industrial seaboard[3]. For example, 92.3 % of African imports to U.S in 2008 consisted of oil[4]. The ‘War on Terror’ has also provided US-NATO command with justification for securitising the ‘dangerous’ West African Muslim states.

In 2006 the US began military exercises on land and sea in different African countries. Since 2008, AFRICOM, the US military Command Center responsible for Africa, has been officially operational. In 2010 the Pentagon began active military cooperation with several governments in the region (Senegal, Cape Verde, Ghana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé e Príncipe, Mali, and Niger) and has established a military presence in the southern and northern states of Nigeria where the oil fields are located.

The argument that AFRICOM is primarily designed to provide humanitarian support has largely disappeared. Yet the United States still struggles to persuade the African people of the benefits of AFRICOM. To most observers, Africa has never been the intended beneficiary of AFRICOM. Based on the historical record, including direct comments from National Security Advisor James Jones, co-founder of AFRICOM, the goal of the new command is to protect U.S. access to oil and to protect U.S. corporate interests in Africa. Many African countries certainly have serious security concerns. But the behaviour of the states and the national militaries in question, combined with international economic interests, are often the catalysts for that insecurity. The question is whether the United States supports the forces of democracy and rule of law in Africa or whether, by treating dissent with military force rather than traditional law enforcement techniques, the United States has undermined democratic movements and encouraged extremism and the growth of anti-Americanism[5]. Another strategic goal of AFRICOM is to counter and roll-back Chinese economic expansion in the region[6].

The other reason that African policy is a US priority for the next decade is geopolitical and strategic order. In the midst of the current economic-financial crisis, Washington should, as a major global player, direct its efforts in maintaining its positions in global zones, penalty to pay, in the best outcome, a rapid reorganization in regional power, or in the worst, a disastrous collapse, difficult to overcome in the short term. Instead, in line with the traditional geopolitical expansion that has always marked its relations with other parts of the planet, Washington chose Africa with its ample space to manoeuvre, from which to relaunch its military weight on the global plane in order to contest the Asian powers for world supremacy[7].

Another tool of US penetration into Africa is economic-financial structures and programs (seen in the case of sanctions against Sudan and the interference of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the relationship between the Democratic Republic of Congo and China) with such initiatives like the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Communication strategy should also be seen as a vector for US interest promotion in Africa, such as Obama’s speeches, already considered “historic”, in Cairo and Accra[8].

Attempts to establish control over Africa runs under the guise of new generation partnership and dialogue as well[9]. Africa underdevelopment is also a strategic concern for US geopolitical designs. U.S. military strategist Thomas Barnett has spoke about the ‘non-integrated gap’ of Africa and Middle Asia that must be integrated into the functional global core[10].

The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), as an influential instrument of U.S. foreign policy also provides the US government with recommendations for dealing with African states. In Contingency Planning Memorandum No.11 "Crisis in the Congo" issued in May 2011 CFR advocated Washington to take several bilateral and multilateral steps to reduce the risk of violent instability, including: to improve Regional Engagement, use its influence through the office of the World Bank's American executive director, ensure a UN Presence, increase support for basic military training , etc.[11].

The US’s military presence in Africa also facilitates control over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, particularly in light of the emergence of new phenomena and threats such as piracy, the spreading of information technologies that can to be used for destabilization, water crises, and demographic crises.

The potential threat of conflicts rooted in ethnicity, religion, and tribal politics is a serious challenge for Africa. For example, in Nigeria with a population of 150 million, there are about 250 different ethnic groups, the population is divided between Christians and Muslims, and there are several active rebel groups. Out-of-the-box Western principles of parliamentary democracy based on class divisions do not function in societies divided in terms of identity on these lines[12]. A more complex and tailored approach taking into account regional history, culture, and identity divisions is needed. African critics claim that Europe and the US do not understand the nature and needs of social mobilization in Africa, where economic concerns coexist with ethnic and other divides.

But the economic crisis also demonstrates the contradictions and instability of the neoliberal global economic system, because of which, on the one hand African countries are threatened by transnational capital and re-colonialism, and on the other hand alternatives open to the issues of multilateral cooperation and self governance[13].

An important strategic initiative is the bloc of BRICS countries that have the possibility to turn African policy into a new paradigm. Geopolitically, Russia, India, Brasil and China are Land Powers (Not excluding of course, the necessity to have strategic sea lines of communication for transportation of goods, energy and natural resources).

China, India and Brazil are building relationships that take place within the framework of interaction between post-colonial countries[14], and therefore, these States inspire a higher degree of confidence and trust in Africa, than does the EU and the US with their colonial legacies The most successful foreign policy has been demonstrated by China, through the mechanisms of soft power for economic, industrial and cultural penetration.

One possible alternative trend also is the possibility of the strengthening of the East African Community – a regional economic group with a population of more than 126 million people, whose members include Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. South Sudan with its huge oil reserves also has the potential to join this group[15].

Italian geopolitician Tiberio Graziani notes that,

Africa, in order to safeguard its own resources and stay out of disputes between the US, China, and probably Russia and India – disputes that could be resolved on its own territory – needs to get organised, at least regionally, along three principal lines that pivots with the Mediterranean basin, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean.

The activation of economic and strategic cooperation policies, at least regarding security, between the countries of North Africa and of Europe, on the one hand and similarly with India (to that aim note the Delhi Declaration, drawn up in the course of Summit 2008 India-Africa), on the other, besides making the African regions more interconnected, sets up the basis for a potential future unification of the continent along regional poles and entered in the broadest Euro-Afro-Asian context. Likewise, the Atlantic line, that is the pursuit of strategic south-south cooperation between Africa and Indo-Latin America, would foster, in this case, the cohesion of western African nations and would contribute to the unification of the continent. In particular, the development of the Atlantic line would reinforce the weight of Africa relative to Asia, and to China in the first place[16].

But this plan is based on the old geopolitical scenario of the political game. We have proposed to look at this situation from another point of view. Besides the established concept for global order of unipolarity and multilateralism, there exists the alternative concept of multipolarity (or pluripolarity).

In the unipolar world model, the BRICS countries are thought of separately, as intermediates zones between the core and the periphery of the world or between the centre of globalization and the non-integrated gap. With this approach, the elite of these countries must integrate into the global elite and the masses be consumed in a global melting pot with other lower social strata, including through migration flows and in so doing, lose their cultural and civilizational identity.

But in terms of the multipolar world view, the BRICS can be conceived fundamentally differently. If these countries can develop a common strategy, form a consolidated approach to major global challenges, and develop a joint political bloc, there will come into being a powerful international institution capable of birthing the multipolar world, with enormous technical, diplomatic, demographic and military resources[17].

This project should change the structure of the BRICS to that of a powerful global organization that will be able to dictate their demands to other participants (three countries of BRICS have armed with own nuclear weapons).

So, with the economic and intellectual potential of the BRICS countries and the experience of intercultural and interethnic relations of complementarity, the only true geopolitical strategy for the African continent and in relation to it will be multipolarity.

jeudi, 13 juin 2013

Robert Steuckers:

Europe, Globalization and Metapolitics

Mr. Steuckers, we would like to start our interview by describing the current situation in the EU, especially in its North-West region. What could you tell us about it?

The situation in the Benelux-countries is what I could call a blind alley: the Netherlands, as a multicultural state —now with a majority of Catholics since only a couple of decades, a strong minority of Protestants including the Calvinists, who gave the nation its very birth in the 16th and 17th centuries, Atheists, who currently reject all forms of religious belief, and a Muslim minority within the predominently Moroccan and Turkish immigrant communities— is trying to reject vehemently Islam, as most immigrants don’t behave properly according to the Dutch standards and don’t represent at all a dignified Islam that would fit the general tendency of the Dutch people towards decency, fair play, respectability and gentleness. The Netherlands, due to the long dominating Calvinist elite, show currently a tendency to imitate the worst British or American models, even if Catholics, now a majority, incline to be more receptive to German or other Continental models, be they left-wing or right-wing. The islamophobic bias of the current leader of the PVV-party (“Liberty Party”), Geert Wilders, induce the Dutch government to follow the British and American foreign policy, although the positions of the former islamophobic political leader of the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn, who was a Catholic homosexual and was assassinated by a pseudo-environmentalist thug, was against all Dutch intervention in the Balkan to crush the Serbians and pleaded for a complete withdrawal of the Dutch units that had been sent to Bosnia: this may have been the real reason for his assassination and not the lack of ecological positions in his programme or the quite agressive stances against Muslims he had taken in his political speeches and pamphlets. The Netherlands, although a model state in the current EU-crisis, as its financial status in the euro-zone seems to be perfectly sound, are nevertheless at risk because, exactly like Spain, they have a speculative bubble in real estate, that could explode at any moment.

One thing we should not forget abroad: the Netherlands, together with Flanders in Belgium, are constantly producing a huge amount of books on all levels of human sciences, on topics we are interested in, but that are unfortunately largely ignored in non Dutch-speaking areas, never translated and never quoted in scientific works, despite the fact that Dutch and Flemish intellectuals generally understand and read at least four languages and are therefore able to make remarkable synthesis.

Belgium is now another multicultural state, divided by a linguistic border separating two mainly Catholic communities, the Dutch-speaking Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons (there is also a small German-speaking community in the East of the country, alongside the German border). The Flemings have nowadays a stonger tendency, like the Dutch, to imitate Anglo-Saxon models while the Walloons are deeply influenced by French ways of thinking. The Germans are of course strongly influenced by German ideas and debates. These Low Countries are an incredible patchwork of ideas: you don’t find overthere large currents of ideas widely partaken within the population; on the contrary, you’ll find everything, left-wing or right-wing, sometimes expressed in very original ways but no social coherence deduced from this wide variety of ideas. Even within the main political parties (liberal, christian-democrats, socialists), tendencies are numerous among the leaders and the militants. The main trend is of course to accept the Western views within the frame that NATO is, although all the opposite elements are historically (Harmel) or currently (Collon) available to develop a strong critique of the NATO-ideology and praxis. Besides, people are not really interested in the operations launched in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria. They don’t support the army sent overthere in these NATO-invaded countries (surely because the army is not a conscription army anymore), just as Pim Fortuyn wanted to withdraw Dutch troops from ex-Yugoslavia. I think personally, and I repeat it here, that this was most probably the main reason for his assassination and not the deliberate act of a crazy environmentalist activist; later, when the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by a Muslim fanatic because he had produced a short film allegedly criticizing presumed Islamic anti-feminism, the religious creeds of the assassin contributed to justify paradoxically the pro-NATO attitudes of Fortuyn’s successor in the Dutch populist ideological area, i. e. Geert Wilders, whose father was born in the Catholic province of Limburg near the German City of Aachen and whose mother is an Indian Hindu, most probably quite hostile to Muslims. The loyalty of the son towards his mother could explain some islamophobic BJP-like attitudes...

In the Low Countries, you can perceive a lot of isolated reactions against the System whereby the efforts of a Chomsky-inspired politologist like the ex-Maoist activist Michel Collon in French-speaking Belgium are the most notorious abroad. Belgium is nevertheless a fragilized country, even if the three Low Countries belong to the strongest economical powers within the EU. The effects of the crisis and the recession are palpable in Belgium now, as prices for food and first necessity products are a lot higher than in France and Germany, reducing drastically the common people’s purchasing power. Belgium maintains its relative stability only because of the giant customer-neighbour that is Germany, that buys goods in Belgium to produce other goods in Germany for the Russian and Chinese markets. So Germany, and by “translation” as a math teacher would say, Belgium and the Netherlands, are main partners of the most prominent Eurasian BRICS-countries, even if the NATO-oriented thrash-elite doesn’t want to be considered as such, despite the economical and commercial facts and figures. Thus “Little Belgium” shares a part of the German pie in Eurasia: in high commercial caucuses they are well aware of it and some cleverer minds dream of recuperating the positions Belgium had before 1914 in Russia (as Russia was the main commercial partner of Belgium between 1890 and 1914) and even in China, where many commercial missions are sent regularly.

To conclude these short thoughts about the Low Countries, I would suggest Russian friends to create a small caucus for Dutch and Flemish studies in order to gather useful information that no one else would in the long run be able to take profit of.

- Austerity policies are now implemented in Southern Europe: how do you perceive them in the North-West? And what about the idea of a Pan-European solidarity or concert of nations in a crisis context?

You’ll probably know in Russia that the tragedy in Europe is that Northern people don’t have high consideration for their Southern neighbours and a political thinker such as Jean Thiriart, who remains a source of inspiration for me and for Prof. Dugin, deeply regretted it. Most people in Northern Europe say that we should force Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy to accept these austerity policies but by thinking so they refuse to take the plain fact into consideration: the speculation of Wall Street banksters against the more fragile Southern European countries are speculations against the EU as a whole and an attempt to smash the euro as an alternative currency to the dollar, that some BRICS countries could have accepted as a mean to regulate international trade. The Atlanticist blindness prevent the EU-leaders to perceive these US-based banksters speculation as an extreme lethal weapon in the new non military types of warfare, just as spying European labs or engineering bureaus through the ECHELON-satellites system, just as exciting immigrants in French suburbs to start a guerilla warfare against the police to finally eliminate Chirac (who committed two main sins: developing further a French autonomous nuclear armament in 1995, according to De Gaulle’s vision, and having supported the idea of an Alliance between Paris, Berlin and Moscow during the British-American assault on Iraq in 2003) and replace him by a wacko politician such as Nicolas Sarkozy, who would some months later reintroduce France in the NATO High Command, just as sending “femens” trying to ridicule able politicians or archbishops, just as creating ex nihilo “orange revolutions”, etc. Indeed, as you suggest it, a wide and indefectible solidarity would be preferable in Europa than the current Southerner-bashing we are experimenting these days, especially as the three main peninsulas in the Mediterranean area are of the highest strategical importance and are potential springboards to invade the Centre and the North of the European subcontinent. One key idea would simply be to support the Southern European countries in a new policy consisting of refusing to pay banks back and to restart a new area, as they successfully did in Iceland. This would of course ruin all the dogmas of neo-liberalism. But is this not the ultimate aim of our struggle?

The more or less official journal of the EU, “Europe’s World”, presents in its Spring 2013 issue two positions about the crisis, the one of Hans-Olaf Henkel, President of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), once an avowed advocate of the euro: he suggests now to create a “Northern euro” making an end to the promised Pan-European solidarity. Then the head of the European Institute at the London School of Economics, Paul De Grauwe, in the same issue of “Europe’s World”, pleads in favour of a “fiscal union” as that in the United States, even if the process of establishing it would take time, in order to avoid eurozone governments issuing debt in euros without being able to control the currency, what, according to De Grauwe, “prevents governments to give a guarantee to bondholders that the cash will always be available to pay them at maturity” (p. 28). Even if we have to be quite suspicious in front of all what the mainly neo-liberal London School of Economics theorizes, this strategy, suggested by De Grauwe, would reinforce European unity and avoid speculation against weaker countries. De Grauwe calls his suggested system the “pooling of eurozone governments’ debts” in order that “the weakest are protected from destructive movements of fear and panic that arise in the financial markets, and that in theory can hit any member country” (for instance, the Netherlands if the real estate bubble would give some banksters the opportunity to speculate against this otherwise financial “sound state”). Only this way could Europe become a full actor on the multipolar chessboard and be protected against the weapon of speculation that is a permanent risk when you remain glued in the Euro-Atlanticist realm where the “allies” aren’t allies anymore since the Clinton Doctrine described them as mere “alien audiences” that can be thrashed if there is somehow a fear in Washington that these “allies” could become very soon real competitors.

Northern pride or not, learned and authorized voices in Germany predict a bad future for the economical superpower in the very Middle of the European subcontinent: both Conservative Count Christian von Krockow and Socialist Thilo Sarrazin enumerate the problems Germany has now to face: dereliction of the education system, which is now unable to generate the needed amount of technical or scientific elites, demographic downfall, ideological stalemate, refusal of the immigrants to assimilate or even to integrate, non manageable crisis of the Welfare State, etc. The crisis affecting Greece or Spain are only preludes to the big crisis that will hit whole Europe, including Germany, in the next decades, if a complete and total change of mind doesn’t occur.

- Are economics a fate for Europe or is there a deeper base for a union (or a separation) of all European people?

Europa had of course to harmonize its economy after the Second World War, as the five or six gloomy years that followed 1945 were a disaster for our countries, a tragical derelict period in our history that an American or British historian, Keith Lowe, describes in a recent book; these were years of misery just as in the former Eastern Block and in the Soviet Union. Germany was a heap of ruins and France and Italy had been harshly hit too by carpet bombings (although to a lesser extent than Germany) and destructions due to military operations dotted both countries. We cannot deny a real European patriotism among the first architects of the European unification process (as Schuman, Adenauer and De Gasperi): their obvious aim was to make of Europe —this time through economical and not through military means— what Carl Schmitt would have called a “Greater Area” (a “Grossraum”). But due to a degenerative process induced by mass consumption and “sensate” materialistic attitudes (I use here the word “sensate” as it was coined by Pitirim Sorokin), out of which the May 68 ideology was the apex, partly due to the constant but silent efforts of former OSS-agent Herbert Marcuse, the staunch vision of a United Europe (or even of a “Eurafrica”) gave way to a kind of general capitulation, leaving the leadership of the Euro-Atlantic zone to the United States, a process that is about to be definitively achieved now when the Americans are trying to control the whole African continent through the recently set up AFRICOM-Command and so to get rid there of the Chinese first, who will be followed by the French now helping the Yankees in Mali! Sic transit gloria mundi! We can agree with many observers that the “sensate” mentality and the priority given to materialistic values have been deliberately induced by American think tanks who were and are transfering into practice the ideas of Sun Tsu, according to whom you have to weaken your potential ennemies or competitors by awakening among them a Sybarite mentality.

If set down as the main and only possible motor to create a social system at narrow-national or wide-continental levels, economics induces by fatality, and as a practice banking on quantities and not rightly on qualities, a materialistic worldview that emerges and eliminates quickly all other values, as Julien Freund could demonstrate it, and gets rid of all ethical or historical sense of duty. Each form of triumphant materialism prompt people not to feel linked to their fellow countrymen anymore or instigates them not to respect religious ethical duties towards others, be they partaking the same beliefs as they do or, as Christian or Tolstoian ethics lays it, be they simply human beings who should be respected as such with no other consideration. It is in this sense of abandoning all national-political or religious links that Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who together with his wife Lucy Kerrick, translated Dostoievski into German, said that after only some decades of liberalism (i. e. The “sensate” materialistic ideology of what the Russian economist and sociologist Sergej Nikolaievich Bulgakov —1871-1944— called “bourgeoisnost”, a neologism aiming at defining the utilitarian ideology of British liberalism) a people simply dies as a genuine value-born community and become a heap of scattered individuals, as we have now in our countries. Europe should have first be unified by means of a common “culture”, by a common educational system, and, in a second step, we would have coined a common constitutional and civil law system, respecting ethnic and linguistic communities (“real communities”) throughout the subcontinent. So all the prerogatives of the Indo-European “First Function”, according to the French academician Georges Dumezil, would have been set down as a very first frame for a future unification process. Later, the “Second Function” should have been established by constituting an autonomous military system, not depending on the NATO structures (as it was fully juridically possible in each Western European country), including a European production network for modern weapons in order not to depend from abroad for military supplies. Only after having created a general culture, education, law and defence frame, we could have thought of various unification processes on economical levels. The first think you have to do is to design the frame for all non materialistic values, which would be the real backbone of the genuine “ideational” (Sorokin) civilisation you want to promote, except perhaps in the European context in the late Forties and in the beginning of the Fifties, where urgently needed attempts to unify the subcontinent on economical level were reduced to the essential and the minimum, i. e. the coal and steel industry (EGKS/CECA).

- After the Second World War, the United States got a very strong influence on Western Europe, that was subsequently transformed into a junior partner in a Euro-Atlantic political community with so-called “shared values”. How does “Euro-Atlanticism” works nowadays in Europe?

The process of linking Western Europe, and now all the former COMECON-countries, to the United States has been long and quite complicated to understand it in all its aspects (and to explain them in a short interview) but one can say without any hesitation that it has never been studied systematically till yet. Let’s say, to put it in a nutshell, that the first attempt of the United States to colonize mentally the Europeans (their most dangerous potential foes) was to submerge the European cinematographic industry in the ocean of Hollywood productions. The battle was thus “metapolitical”. Hollywood was supposed to replace entirely the European film industry. France, that had already developed a good film producing industry before 1939, was positively blackmailed by the Americans in 1948: if the French cinemas didn’t take at least 80% of Hollywood productions to be broadcast everywhere in France, the country wouldn’t benefit from the money of the Marshall Plan, at a crucial moment of postwar French history, when riots and strikes were paralysing the country, when food supplies in big cities were undergoing scarcity, so that we can now blankly ask the question: weren’t the Communists, who organized the strikes and were supposed to operate for the benefit of Moscow, not performing the job the American secret services wanted actually to be done, in order to force France to accept the American “diktat” to give money if the movies were alone productions of Hollywood? In the Fifties, the Social-Democrats were the main secret allies of the Americans, as a result that they were chosen as partners by the American Democrats around Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal policy in the Thirties became a model for socialists throughout the European subcontinent. The metapolitical influence of socialism and social-democracy in Europe has as result that American Democrats are always prefered in Europe than Republicans: remember Kennedy, Clinton (who waged more wars than his Republican predecessors Reagan or Bush Senior), Obama (who’s continuing Bush Junior’s wars and replacing troops by drones, causing even more numerous casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan...). I would like to take the opportunity to evoke here two important books to understand the mechanisms of Europe’s colonization by the United States:

- Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French – The Dilemma of Americanization, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1993;

- Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War – The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1994.

But the strategies developed in the European countries didn’t work properly: France under De Gaulle left NATO and asserted an original diplomacy throughout the world, partly along the lines defined by the Non-Aligned as suggested by De Gaulle’s famous declaration in Pnonh Penh (Cambodia) in 1966. This new French diplomacy, supported by able ministers like Couve de Murville and Jobert, was also backed by the high technological development of French aeronautics industry, producing among others the famous Mirage III fighters, that gave Israel the victory in June 1967. These planes were sold everywhere in the world and were serious competitors to American equals. Germany, despite its total destruction in 1945 and the millions of men who were prisoners of war in Europe (one million alone for France!), in the Soviet Union and in America could recover completely, in particular due to the courage of the women who helped rebuild the towns, the so-called “Trummerfrauen” or “Ruins ladies”, and could start the real economical wonder at the end of the Fifties, what aroused admiration even among former anti-Fascists. Germany had and still has a weak point: it has no aeronautics industry anymore but a well-developed automobile industry, perhaps the best in the world. The United States lost a lot of parts on the car markets in Europe due to the renewal of the celebrated German car brands: even American consumers started to buy German Volkswagen, Mercedes or BMW, just as Chinese or Russian new rich do nowadays. So the United States, once favorable to the European unification process, in order to get a huge market for their own products, began to reject secretely Europe as a unified economical block and to organize a commercial war against a lot of products like Camembert or Gruyere cheese, bananas from the French islands in the Caribbean Sea etc. European high technology companies, such as a German one producing solar panels, were spied by the ECHELON-Satellites; some former COMECON-countries were invited to join the EU and the NATO, so that the Europeans would pay endlessly for the constitution of a new military block aiming at “containing” Russia. The Europeans were to pay to sustain the weak countries and the Americans were taking the strategic benefits of the new situation without giving out a single penny. The last act of war is of course the speculation against the weaker economies of Southern Europe, in order to strike the “weak Mediterranean” belly of the subcontinent officially described as an ally but actually treated as a foe.

According to geopolitican Robert Strauss-Hupe, who was formerly a collaborator of General Karl Haushofer’s “Journal of Geopolitics” (“Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik”) in his native Germany but had to leave the Reich after Hitler’s arrival to power because he was partly Jewish or had a Jewish wife and had to settle in America where he became an adviser of the US war machine, Europe and Germany in its middle part will always be potentially stronger than the United States for several reasons, among which he counted the excellence of the education systems and the “racial homogeneity”. The May 68 plots, coined by former OSS-officers like Herbert Marcuse (another German emigre) and many others, managed to destroy or at least to handicap seriously the European education systems. The importation of immigrants, having not benefited from a serious level of education in their own derelict countries, aimed at paralysing the social security systems and at compelling the European States to devote incredibly huge budgets to help these new masses of jobless people to survive in everyday life instead of creating for instance a good military or aeronautics industry. Second purpose of mass immigration is to be able to manipulate these masses in order to create severe civilian disorder in countries that could, for one reason or another, loose the links that bond them to America: this was said frankly by a former US ambassador in Paris, Charles Rivkin (that we shouldn’t confuse with the economist Jeremy Rivkin), who started a policy of supporting leaders of agressive youth gangs in the Parisian suburbs and promising them American and Saoudi or Qatari support. The riots that set ablaze the Parisian suburbs in November 2005 were a revenge of the US neo-conservatives aiming at chasing “disloyal Chirac” from power and to replace him by the man who took away a maximum of votes from Chirac’s RPR/UMP and from Le Pen’s “Front National”, i. e. Nicolas Sarkozy, by promising the French to “karcherize the banlieues” and to eliminate the “racaille” (the riffraff) (a “Karcher” is a brand derived noun, as Karcher-machines are used to remove the dust or the filth from houses’ walls by using an extreme powerful water spray). Nothing of that sort was obviously ever done but Sarkozy came to power and brought France back in the NATO and waged a war against Libya, so that the Congress in Washington hadn’t to vote war credits... The 2005 Parisian riots were used to promote an obscure suburb politician, who uttered a strong agressive and hysterical language to gather votes in order to change radically the Gaullist political orientations of his country in favour of the American world strategy. Objective observers can so see what can be the useful purpose of jobless masses in “alien audiences” (Bill Clinton), that are perhaps “allies” but should sometimes be thrashed.

American influence is consolidated by several musical fashions and modes and through media agencies that always convey the US interpretation of world events. In France, the best exemple is furnished by the so-called “nouveaux philosophes”. This bunch of jabbering nonsense and humbug producers is determining the agenda of French politics since the end of the Seventies. The figurehead of the bunch is undoubtedly Bernard-Henry Levy (BHL), who has indirectly —with a leftist or pseudo-theological or pseudo-republican (French style) “wind language” (this expression was coined by Regis Debray)— supported all the American or Israeli moves on the international chessboard, depicting all the ennemies of America as if they all were dangerous Fascists, venomous dictators or backward populists, nationalists or paleo-communists. In France, BHL lead a systematic campaign against all possible challengers in domestic politics and not only against the nationalists around Le Pen. So the “shared values” of the so-called “Atlantic Community of Values” are now a mix of conservative Atlanticists (when some naive Catholics or Protestants believe that Washington is a kind of new protecting and benevolent Rome, as an otherwise interesting student of late Carl Schmitt, Erich Voegelin, who migrated to the United States during Hitler’s time, theorized), of Socialists of all kinds linked to the American Democrats in the Rooseveltian tradition, Manchesterian liberals who believe religiously in the credos coined by Adams Smith’s heirs, left-wing liberals a la Cohn-Bendit whose endeavours to promote the dissoluting anti-values of May 68 in order to weaken permanently Europe for the benefit of the United States, recycled Trotskites who replace the former Bolshevik notion of “permanent revolution” by the the actual practice of “permanent war” on Brzezinski” Eurasian chessboard (see the polemic books and articles of Robert Kagan), a permanent war around the territory of Afghanistan aiming at containing and destroying Russia, perceived as the heir power of the Czars and of Stalin. These are of course the “anti-values”, the values of “Non Being” as Jean Parvulesco polemically called them, against which my friends and I have struggled since the very beginning of our public activities. They are indeed “non being” values as it is impossible to build a lasting state or empire banking on them (for instance Parvulesco’s vision of an “End of time’s Eurasian Empire”). BHL endeavours have as main and only purpose to prevent the return of real political values, such as the ones Carl Schmitt and Julien Freund (among many others) illustrated in their precious works.

- Do you feel more “freedom” in Europe after Obama announced the emergence of a US “Pacific Axis”?

No. Not really. But maybe we can say that constant pressure is not needed anymore in Western Europe now because our countries are politically dead after so many decades of “liberalism” as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck would have said. It is also true that after the tragical and awful events in Libya in 2011-2012, where BHL was Sarkozy’s adviser instead of the French army’s generals (!), the figurehead of the “nouveaux philosophes” has lost a good deal of his impact on public opinion. The Lybian affair caused among other changes in French domestic politics the fall of Sarkozy who betrayed De Gaulle’s vision of international politics, in which France should have played an independant role in front of the orther superpowers. One of the last flops BHL committed in April 2012 was to describe Algeria —which is now simultaneously courted by the United States to join an informal “Southern NATO” around US main ally Morrocco and threatened like Syria is for keeping the militarized FLN in power since the independance of the country in 1962— not as an Arab and Muslim country but as a Jewish and French country! This vicious attack is emblematic in a certain way as Algeria wanted to be an Arab, Panarabian and Arab nationalist country within the community of Arab countries, despite the fact that most of the Algerians are of Berber/Capsian stock. The Arab reference of the Algerian nationalists, who spoke in the Sixties a dialect quite different from the classical Arabic language, was to take the new independant country out of isolation, to participate to a wider range of non aligned nations and to be close to the Nasserite form of the Panarabian ideal. Although a very interesting political figure as the former Algerian President Houari Boumediene remained a purely political thinker who could generate a team of very able diplomats in the Seventies and Eighties (before the terrible civil war of the “Blood Decade” from 1992 to 2003). These diplmats could for instance solve the problems between Iran and Iraq in 1975, when the circulation of oil vessels could be pacifically regulated in the Chatt-el-Arab part of the Gulf. Iran was represented by the Shah and Iraq by Saddam Hussein. Mohammed Sahnoun, adviser of President Chadli (Boumediene’s successor), was the head of a geopolitcal school in Algeria and lead the diplomatic mission to solve the problems in the Grand Lakes area in Africa. Sahnoun pleaded for an Euro-African alliance aiming at keeping the United States out of the Black Continent, especially out of the Horn of Africa, a region which is a strategic bridgehead to the Indian Ocean, described by Mackinder’s heir as the “Heart Sea” in front of Russia as the “Heart Land”. Still more interesting, Sahnoun theorized in a positive way the pacific and cooperative juxtaposition on the international chessboard of “cultures”, that would have to come back to their roots and abandon the false seductions of mean modern ideologies. Sahnoun is the real antidote to the conflict arousing perspective of late Samuel Huntington, who perceived the cultures as automatically antagonist. His ideas find an echo in the works of his Japanese alter ego, Moriyuki Motono, adviser of former Prime Minister Nakasone, who also pleaded for a pacific juxtaposition of “cultural areas” but having this time neighbouring “intersection areas” which would help neighbours to understand each other better, simply because they have in their spiritual heritage values shared by both neighbouring cultures.

Boumediene had been a student of Arab literature and was surely a pious Muslim but he never used religion as an emblem of his “Algerian specific socialism”. When BHL says that Algeria is neither a Muslim country, he attacks also the Salafists of the wide range of Muslim-oriented political forces in Algeria. To say that Algeria is both Jewish and French means that Algeria is unable to help itself and needs a recolonization by the Jews and French, who were expelled in 1962. BHL added that in the short run Algeria will be undergoing an “Arab Spring” like Libya and Syria. This is of course a clear threat to an independant country which has already experimented a civil war that caused hundreds of thousands of casualities. But this has been too much: BHL isn’t taken seriously anymore. Even the Belgian daily paper “Le Soir” (25th April 2013) titled “la Syrie ne fait plus recette” (“Syria doesn’t bring cash anymore”), deploring that initiatives to raise money for the Syrian rebels in Belgium isn’t a success. So the whole ideology that BHL and his chums are trying to impose with a good dose of forcefulness loses currently all impact: people aren’t interested anymore.

This attack against Algeria brings me directly back to your question: the purpose of the Atlanticists is to include Algeria in a kind of “Southern NATO” by giving the former Spanish Sahara to Morrocco and give Mauretania as a kind of newly designed colony to an officially anti-colonialist Algeria, so that Algeria could get its geopolitical dream fulfilled by being simultaneously a Mediterranean and an Atlantic power. The problem is that the distance between de Mediterranean and the first parts of the Mauretanian Atlantic shore is incredbly long: more than three thousand kilometers of sand desert, with poor communications by road or railway and so without any economical utility and permanently under the threat of the Morroccan army, which can at any time withdraw in the Atlas mountains and strike back at will. The gift suggested is not a real gift. The US goal is to control the whole former French West Africa, from Dakar in Senegal to Somalia, Djibuti included, in order to protect the exploitation of oil fields in Nigeria, Camerun and Chad and to prevent the Chinese to be the leading exploiting power in Black Africa. So your question asking if Europeans feel more “safe” or “free” since Obama decided to give priority to a Pacific Axis can be obviously answered negatively as the containment of China in the Pacific implies a US presence in Africa and the creation of a “Southern NATO” being an annex of a general AFRICOM-bolt that would encircle completely Europe on its meridional flank. If China loses its African positions, it will be considerably weakened and unable to order as many goods as nowadays in Europe. Germany would also be weakened and Belgium risks to be in the same situation as Greece or Spain, as its public debt is quite high, especially since the compelled taking over of two bankrupt banks after 2008 (Fortis and Dexia/Belfius): the planned crumbling down of the eurozone would be brought to an end and the “Northern euro” would only be a dream of paleo-nationalists in Germany and Northern Europe. One must not forget that Belgium and especially the Walloon coal-and-steel areas were hit by the Iranian Islamic revolution that prevented the consolidation of the nuclear power and steel industry cooperation that the Shah started with France, Germany and Belgium. The so-called Islamic revolution in Iran had for us all severe consequences so that, even if we refused all forms of agression against present-day Iran and if we respect the positions of President Ahmadinedjad on the Eurasian chessboard and in Latin America (when he cooperated with Chavez), we don’t share some views of yours and of former ex-Maoist journalist Michel Collon about the history of Iran before the Islamic revolution of 1978-79. We don’t forget that the same “nouveaux philosophes” and Trotskites, who preached against the Shah in the streets of Paris, Brussels and Berlin in 1977-78, are now trying to excite people against Ahmadinedjad, exactly as they did against Milosevic, Putin, Lukachenko, Khadafi and others! The purpose is to prevent all cooperation between Europe and Iran, be the regime overthere Imperial or Islamic; therefore we defend the positions of the Shah in the Seventies and we support all initiatives trying to prevent a useless and criminal war against Ahmadinedjad’s Iran.

Obama’s Pacific Axis has thus effects on the Southern flank of Europe. Wherever they strike, they hit us all. Hitting China in Africa means hitting Europe here and there too.

-What do you think about EU-outsiders such as Turkey, Serbia and some ex-Soviet countries like Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine?

Turkey is a tremendously interesting country to study and it fascinates me since two memorable periods in my life: 1) the long trip our Latin and Philosophy teachers organized for us to Turkey in the Summer of 1972; 2) My subsequent reading of Arnold Toynbee’s pages on Bythinia, the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Byzantine strategy; according to Toynbee, who was a “byzantologist”, the power that dominates the small narrow former Roman province of Bythinia and the neighbouring Bosphorus area is able to expend in all directions, i. e. the Black Sea, the Balkan, Caucasus, Syria, Egypt and Northern Africa and even beyond if enough material and human means are available. It’s maybe therefore that the American strategist Edward Luttwak has recently written a book about the Byzantine strategy, which aimed, when the Byzantine Empire was still a powerful commonwealth, at controlling all the former areas of the first Roman Empire exactly like the Ottomans will later try to expend alongside the same geostrategical lines. The Ottomans couldn’t perform the task: their sea power was fragilized after the battle of Lepanto (1571) and the definitive blowback was a fact after they failed to take the City of Vienna in 1683. After the terrible defeat in front of Vienna’s walls, their decay period started, even if they could maintain their grip on the Balkans, Syria, Palestina, Iraq and Egypt till the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78, the Balkan uprisings of 1912-13 and the defeat of 1918. In the eyes of their leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Islamic-Ottoman option had been brought to an end and the remaining Turkish state had to follow other paths. It should first get rid of the Islamic past and find a new identity that according to Ataturk himself should be a Hittite identity (he therefore opened an archeological museum in Ankara). By choosing a Hittite identity, Ataturk intended to identify his country, reduced to the Anatolian part of the former Ottoman Empire and bereft of all the Iraqi oil fields, with an Indo-European people that came from Europe to conquer Anatolia, where it left an astonishing civilisation, and induced geostrategical lines that were taken over by the Romans and the Crusaders marching towards Syria and Mesopotamia. The Hittite rage didn’t last long in modern Turkey and was replaced in the political mythology of the anti-islamic military elite by Panturkism or Panturanism, aiming at assembling all Turkish-speaking people in one giant state from the Egean to China. This Panturkic ideology was resolutely anti-Soviet as the main Turkish-speaking area the Panturkists wanted to acquire were in Soviet hands in Central Asia. In 1942, when the Germans could have taken Stalingrad and cut in their very middle the supply routes the Americans had created in Iran by organizing the Paniranian railways and in the Northern Atlantic from New York to Murmansk by organizing huge convoys of “Liberty ships” bringing ammunitions and material to the Soviet Army, Turkish officers around Staff-Chief General Cakmak proposed in Berlin to invade the Caucasus but their scheme was so abstruse that the Germans didn’t want this suggested alliance implying the emergence of an even more dangerous super-state in the East.

Erdogan has inaugurated a new era in Turkish politics as he rejects officially the non religious Hittite and Panturanic/Panturkic projects in favour of a renewed Ottoman-Islamic scheme. His aim is to crush the former military elite and to replace it by a new pious “bourgeoisie” that thrived economically in the new developing area in the South-East part of present-day Turkey. We cannot meddle in the domestic affairs of Turkey and dictate the Turks in which way they should think. So be the official ideology Kemalist or Neo-Ottoman/Islamic, we don’t care and simply hear and listen to what Turkish politicians say. But when Erdogan comes to Germany or Belgium and urges Turkish people living in our countries not to assimilate (which I can understand because Europe lives now in a dangerous and deleterious period of decay) and to form a kind of “Fifth Column” in a Europa that they will in the end control and bereave of its identity, we cannot agree. We disagree too with the Syrian policy that Erdogan followed in supporting the Western- and Qatari-backed rebels against the Baath regime of Bechar El-Assad. It would have been better if Turkey had followed its initial policy of friendly relationships with Syria before the fatidic visit of Erdogan and Gul in Damascus in August 2011, when they tried to impose ministers of the rebellious “Muslim Brotherhood” in a next hypothetical Syrian government. The links that the present-day Turkish president has in the bank world of the Gulf Emirates and most probably of Qatar are of course another problem, that can jeopardize fruitful future relations with Europe and Russia. Erdogan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmet Davutoglu, nicknamed the “Hoca”, the “Professor”, in Turkey, wanted to develop a neo-Ottoman foreign policy, which we could have accepted in its first version, as it wanted “zero problems on our borders” and started the first positive policy towards Syria, Iran, Libya and other powers in the Near- and Middle-East. But this orientation has had no future, unfortunately. Of course from a European, Austrian, Panorthodox and Russian point of view, we cannot accept the expansion of a neo-Ottoman scheme in the Balkan, that would be backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the so-called Islamic finance, from which apparently Gul proceeds. Even if Prof. Dugin and his Italian friend Claudio Mutti were deeply influenced by Leontiev’s ideas, which prefered an Ottoman domination in the Balkan than the juxtaposition of false Orthodox mini-powers strongly influenced by modern Western ideas, things have changed in the second half of the 20th century and it is of course now better for all of us to support in the Balkan Croatian or Serbian geopolitics.

This brings us to Serbia. This country is the “core area” of the Balkan. Even if Germans had a general tendency to support Croatia in the Nineties instead of Serbia, the Austrian geopolitician Baron Jordis von Lohausen supported Serbia at the end of his life and even evoked an Axis “Vienna-Belgrado” to link Danubian Europe to the Egean by the shortest river and land roads. Croatia has a different perspective on geopolitics: its geopolitical lines are Adriatic-Mediterranean and the only conflict with Serbia was about a “window” on the Danube river at Vukovar where fierce fights opposed Croatian troops to the Serbian Army. In 1995, the Croatian Army conquered the Kraina region, which was peopled by Serbian villagers but was a strategic balcony threatening Dalmatia’s harbours which were formerly Croatian-Venetian. The dramas of Vukovar and the Kraina have certainly left a huge amount of bitterness in former Yugoslavia but the core area that Serbia is has not been so dangerously threatened as it was later by the Kosovar independance movement lead by the Albanian-speaking UCK-militia. Kosovo was till the Ottoman invasion in the 14th century a pure Serbian province, in which the tragical battle of the “Blackbirds’ Field” took place and in which the oldest Orthodox monastries stood. The independance of Kosovo is certainly the oddest mutilation of Serbian territory that we have to deplore. As you perhaps know, I am and was a friend of both Tomislav Sunic, the Croatian thinker, and of late Dragos Kalajic, the Serbian painter and traditional philosopher who published the Serbian version of the magazine “Elementy”. I am also a friend of Jure Vujic, the Croatian geopolitician and political scientist who recently published a book on Atlanticism and Eurasianism, for which I wrote a foreword: you have commented this book and my introduction on one of your websites. Sunic, Vujic and Kalajic were speakers at our Euro-Synergies’ Summer Courses in France, Italy and Germany. Sunic has written a book on the American Evil in Croatian and so did Kalajic (“Amerikanski Zlo”) in Serbian. In 1999, together with Laurent Ozon in France, I opposed the NATO-intervention against Yugoslavia and I spoke with Kalajic and his Italian friend Archimede Bontempi in Milano, together with the Mayor of the City, to explain how the war against Serbia was a war against Europe, which purpose it was to block all river traffic on the Danube and to destroy for long all developments in the Adriatic Sea, where NATO-fighters dropped their extra bombs in the sea, killing Italian fishermen. We dispatched the texts of the gallant American senator of Serbian origin, Bob Djurdjevic and, on their side, the left-wing Professors Michel Collon and Jean Bricmont did the same: Collon remembers this all around dispatching of counter-information on Serbia as the first resistance action on the internet in a recent speech he held in Brussels and Bricmont was even savagely beaten up by the thugs of the Brussels police and thrown an all night in a dirty cell because he stood in front of the NATO-buildings in the Belgian capital, just as some years later the Italian member of European Parliament and former Justice Secretary of State Mario Borghezio, who had opposed the bombings of Belgrado too, got also —even if he is an elderly man— a hiding with truncheons by the same scum and thrown in a cell: the Italian Embassy had to send officers to order the Belgian government to let him immediately free.

Kosovo is the central part of what Kalajic called the “Islamic chain of States” that Americans and Saudis intended to install in the Balkan in order to bolt the landway between Central Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, leaving Greece isolated and weakening all possible allies of Russia in this area. Kosovo will shelter the hugest military base of the United States in Europe, the “Camp Bondsteele”, that was built by Halliburton and where a substantial part of the US garrisons of Germany will move to. The purpose of this policy could have been read in Sir Nigel Bagnall’s book about the “Illyrians operations” of the Romans between 229 and 227 B.C. and between 215 and 205 B.C. In these historical studies by the former Chief of the British General Staff, the importance of the central areas of the Balkan are duly stressed: the book has been written in 1990 and its German translation dates back 1995, just four years before the bombings started in Serbia (Sir Nigel Bagnall, Rome und Karthago – Der Kampf ums Mittelemeer, Siedler, Berlin, 1995). A control of this central Kosovar-Serbian part of the Balkan allows every superpower to threaten or control Italy and to benefit from a springboard towards Anatolia and further East, exactly like the Ancient Macedonians did at the time of Alexander the Great at the eve of his invasion of the Persian Empire. The Ottomans, once they could control the same areas in the 14th century, became a permanent threat for Italy, Central Europe and the Black Sea (Pontic) area. So an intact Serbia could have been the territory that would have united Central Europe (Austria’s imperial heritage) and Russia (in a Panorthodox perspective) in the struggle to repel all foreign powers out of the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Adriatic Sea and the Pontic area.

Now the EU and the United States are trying to blackmail Serbia, promising a rapid membership in the EU if Serbia recognizes Kosovo as an independant state. I hope Serbia is not going to abandon its traditional position and still will consider Kosovo as a lost province that will one day be Serbian again.

If we hear almost nothing about Moldova here in Western Europe, Belarus is described in our mainstream media as a clownish dictatorship of paleo-communist bigots. Belarus is nevertheless the central part of the North-South “Baltic/Pontic” line. There are three such North-South lines in Europe: 1) the Rhine/Rhone line linking by landways the North Sea to the Mediterranean; 2) the Baltic/Adriatic line from Stettin or Gdansk/Dantzig to Trieste in Italy or Pula in Croatia; this area will in the short run be linked by a direct railway track linking Dantzig to Ravenna in Northern Italy, a City that was the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy, which was conquered by the Byzantine General Belisarius in 536. In the Middle Ages, King Ottokar II Przmysl (1253-1278) of Bohemia wanted to create a realm linking the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic: the future rapid railway track between Gdansk/Dantzig and Ravenna will fulfill his dream; 3) the Baltic/Pontic line has never been united except perhaps by the Goths at the eve of the Hun invasion of Central Europe and the Roman Empire; therefore this line is sometimes called the “Gothic Axis”. The Polish-Lithuanian state was an attempt to restore this Axis under the Baltic-Slavonic Jagellon dynasty but the project failed due to the Ottoman conquest of the present-day Ukrainian territories beyond Odessa and of the Crimean peninsula. In the 18th century, the Empress of Russia Catherine dreamt together with the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder to create in this space between Lithuania and Crimea a realm that would be a new Germanic-Baltic-Slavonic Hellas, on the model of Ancient Greece. New enlightened societies would have been created in this area separating Western and Central Europe from Russia, that is simultaneously an “intersection area” according to the Japanese “culturalist” philosopher Moriyuki Motono (cf. supra), who perceives “intersection areas” as unifying factors and not as dividing forces. The very importance of Belarus, as the central part of this potential “intersection area” and of the “Baltic/Pontic” line should prevent the European medias to bash constantly Belarus and its President Lukatshenko and find instead all possible positive approaches of the Belarussian factor.

At the time of the so-called “Orange revolution” (2004-2005), we could have feared that the Ukrainian state would have joined the NATO and have isolated the Crimean Navy base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which was one of the purposes Zbigniew Brzezinski hoped to achieve. For Brzezinski the fall of the Ukraine would have meant the total and complete achievement of his long elaborated strategy, as it would have weakened Russia definitively and made of the Black Sea an American-Turkish lake. Due to the victory of the anti-orange party in Kiev and Kharkov, Brzezinski’s project is doomed to be a failure, what he has recognized himself by saying that his long hammered policy of destroying Russia, by supporting the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan, the secessionist forces in the Muslim Republics of the former Soviet Union and the Ukrainian nationalists couldn’t be carried out in due time and that the United States had now to change strategy and try to ally with Russia in order to create a “Northern Hemisphere” Big Alliance with Northern America, Europe, Russia and Turkey (see one of his last books “Strategic Vision”, published in the United States in March 2012).

- Do you think that some of these countries could possibly join the NATO or the EU for political reasons, like Rumania and Bulgaria did at the time of the so-called NATO-enlargement?

Turkey is already a NATO-member and among the most important ones due to the old strategic position its territory occupies between the Black Sea, the Balkan, the Syrian area, the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. But there is absolutely no necessity for new countries to join the NATO as this Atlantic Alliance had been set up in the time when communism was still a quite virulent ideology that allegedly wanted to export a “world revolution” and put the rest of the world ablaze. This ideology doesn’t exist anymore, except in the form of “trotskism” now skillfully disguised in neo-conservatism as “permanent revolution” (Trotsky) has become “permanent war” (Kagan): the real “communist danger” nowadays is America as a trostskite/neo-con superpower, even more virulent than the Soviet Union ever was. And even in the last years of the “Cold War”, the American grip on Europe became tighter, after the “century’s market” which imposed American fighters in all the air forces of Western Europe instead of the French Mirage or the Swedish Viggen fighter or a new fighter having been produced by a joint Swedish-French venture. This incident proved that our political elite was rotten and corrupted and that they were not conscious of the treason they committed and, subsequently that we were not free and constantly betrayed by degenerated politicians; all that induced us to reject NATO as an enslaving organisation (slaves are not entitled to carry weapons). So since the very beginning of our activities we were hostile to NATO, as Jean Thiriart was some ten years before us. We could bank on several Belgian political traditions, that never could be implemented: when NATO was created under the impulse of the Belgian socialist minister Paul-Henri Spaak, the conservatives among the Belgian politicians were mocking the attempt to build such an Alliance and nicknamed it “Spaakistan”. They were reluctant to include Belgium and the Belgian Congo colony into such a “Spaakistanese” construct. Later the Catholic Prime Minister and future Foreign Affairs minister Pierre Harmel tried to escape the grip of America by proposing new bilateral relationships between small powers of the NATO commonwealth and small powers of the Warsaw Pact, i. e. between Belgium and, for instance, Poland or Hungary (as Catholic countries, Hungary being a State having belonged like Belgium to the Austrian Empire). These ideas, that were impossible to implement due to the total infeodation of Belgium, are nevertheless still alive in the debates run in the country: Prof. Rik Coolsaet and diplomatic TV-journalist Jan Balliauw continue this critical tradition of Belgian intellectuals and diplomatic personnel who were never tired to criticize American policies on the international chessboard.

In 1984 I had the opportunity to meet at the Frankfurt Book Fair former Division General Jochen Loser of the German Army, who also was the last young officer who had been evacuated by a Ju52 plane from Stalingrad after having lost his hand. Loser had been disgusted by the colonialist behaviour of Americans and moreover by the policy of installing Pershing rackets targeting Warsaw Pact positions, risking to provoke Soviet retaliation on the German soil. Consequently Germany, East and West, could have been wiped out the map through a carpet bombing through nuclear weapons. A neutrality policy based on the models of Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden and Yugoslavia was therefore the only rational possibility. The neutral central zone in Europe should, according to Loser, be enlarged to East and West Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg. A Swiss-Yugoslavian bunkerized defence system should have sanctuarized the whole area. The perestroika of Gorbachev made this kind of speculations useless. One year later, General Gunther Kiessling, German delegate officer at the NATO Headquarters in Casteau (Belgium) was also disgusted by the fact that High Staf officers were always American or British despite the fact that European armies were more numerous in the forces displayed by NATO; Kiessling subsequently advocated a foreign policy based on Harmel’s ideas. Our positions, at the very beginning of the history of our magazines “Orientations” and “Vouloir”, stood in this rational, political and non ideological way of thinking and our hostility to Washington’s warmongers derives from these objective statements.

- In one of your articles issued in 1998 you wrote about the priority of “Volk” over abstract state. How do you think about this position now when we have a postmodern mix with the social networks, the long-distance nationalism and the immigrants flows?

I don’t remember exactly about which article you are talking. But nevertheless the sense of belonging, the sense of duty and, if necessary of sacrifice, is only possible when you are embedded in a blood and soil humus or if you’re “roped together” (“encordes”) like alpinists with your fellow-citizens as the present-day French philosopher Robert Redeker says in denouncing the degenerative Western fashions, focussing only on the diseased “ego” reduced to the only physical body, the “Egobody”, as he calls it, and trying to embellish it by artificial interventions or bizarre tricks like tattoos, piercings, mamal implants, etc. Modest traditional people should have a “craddle country”, have a dialect, i. e. words of their own that are a part of their intimate identity, an identity that has to be linked by a “long story” or a memory which ought to be embedded in a genuine history and in songs, poems and novels that are their own and non imported. Intellectuals of course have always had a more open mind, could always throw and catch a glimpse beyond the border of their own kinship but this is of course not a reason to reject viciously what’s carved in your own self and create artificially cosmopolitan societies and pseudo-values, believing they are the only keys to the future, i. e. cosmopolitan societies that neo-liberals a la Soros now call “open societies”. A society is dangerously “open” when all its members have lost their memories, when they are serialized like preserved meat cans or like poor battery chickens. The notion of “Volk” was first coined philosophically by Johann Gottfried Herder, who had a great influence in Russia and inspired the “Narodniki” thinkers. This enabled the Czar in the 19th century to pay linguists and grammarians to write down a first scientific Russian grammar and also, a couple of decades later, grammars of the Baltic languages. Later, even the Soviet system could better preserve the small peoples of the present-day Russian Federation like the Mordves, the Chuvashes, the Maris, etc. and give them autonomous districts or republics that kept their cultural heritage intact without even endangering Soviet Union or current Russia as supranational wholes. This also is a heritage of Herder’s thinking, which is “another Enlightenment” quite different than the Enlightenment that generated the Western ideology. You could of course say that the Soviet system of ethnical republics lead to the tragedy of Chechnya and the dangers of an Islamic rebellion in Tatarstan or Bashkirtostan. I answer this objection by remembering that other Republics, like of course Ossetia remained absolutely true to the links they have since about two centuries with Russia and that the Muslim religious authorities in Kazan develop an Islam that is original and immune in front of all the false seductions of Wahhabism.

Religious values can only be kept alive in the “ethnical-ideational” frames that “Volker” objectively are, without any sanctimonious or bigot derivations. Big overcrowded Cities are a danger for the human kind not only in Europe, in Japan or in Russia but also in Africa (see the horrors of the slums in Nigeria for instance) and in Latin America (Mexico City and his criminal gangs having transformed this poor country —that once upon a time fascinated the English writer David Herbert Lawrence— in a “failed State”). Once more the idea of a variety of people on the surface of the Earth, expressed some decades ago by the Breton thinker Yann Fouere and his Irish fellows among the true leaders of Eire (De Valera, MacBride, etc.), is a true and acceptable “inter-national” idea, i. e. an idea shared “among nations” (Latin, “inter nationes”), as the people are “actually existing” and the pseudo-international, cosmopolitan ideas are mere chimaeras. You cannot sell the cosmopolitan ideas of Parisian intellectuals a la Bernard-Henri Levy in Africa. The Chinese by cleverly refusing to impose their own foreign notions to Africans could conquer markets in the most derelict states of the Black Continent because their leaders were fed up by the moralizing and intrusive interference of the West with their domectic affairs. The French-speaking poet and writer Leopold Sedar Senghor, who became President of Senegal, was an attentive reader of Count de Gobineau, described in all possible “antifa” books and essays as the “Father of Racism”. The couple of pages Gobineau devoted to the African people in is “Essay on the Inequality of Races” didn’t upset the future President of Senegal when he read them as a student involved in the “Negritude” movement in France and French-dominated Africa. Senghor stressed the necessity to keep in each possible culture, in Africa, Europe or elsewhere in the world, the figure of the “conteur”, the “storyteller”, who transmit the people’s memory to the future generations. In a developed country the collective “storyteller” could be the historians and philologists, who surely exist in the best way in our societies, but are edged out and bereft of all consideration in front of all the negative figures of modernity like bankers, economists, lawyers, technocrats, etc. who have wiped out the collective memories in our developed societies, destroying what Redeker, as an attentive reader of Heidegger, calls the “encordements”, the “roped-togetherness”, leaving behind a miserable crippled (sub?)human kind unable to react properly in front of all the challenges of postmodern age.

Postmodern thoughts could have been an opportunity to get rid of the Western ideology that claims to be the only heir of the 18th Century Enlightenment and as such the only “true” acceptable way of thinking: all other forms of thoughts being dismissed as unacceptable, racist, fascist, non democratic, etc. becoming automatically a domestic outlaw, who would surely be totally ignored by the mainstream media (which is a contradiction to the “Human Rights” principles as such an edging-out is equivalent to the forbidden political crime of condemning a citizen to the “civil death”) or an international thug, whose state would be registered in the “Black List” of the contemptible “Axis of Evil States”. Armin Mohler —who wrote the most memorable book introducing us to all the aspects of the German so-called “Conservative Revolution” and asked all non-conformist Europeans in the Sixites and Seventies to show an actual solidarity towards all the States that the USA described as “Rogue States”— had hoped in 1988-89, just some months before the destruction of the Berlin Wall, that postmodern trends would have eroded the Western ideology, which in Germany had become a must in the versions coined by Sir Ralf Dahrendorf (who was a British citizen) and Jurgen Habermas. No one could think, elaborate an ideological corpus outside the only few paths indicated by Habermas, the atrabilious professor who was always rising an admonishing finger. Postmodernity signifies first of all relativism. One could have needed a relativism precisely to “relativize” the new compulsory ideology imposed not only in Germany but everywhere else in Western Europe.

Unfortunately for Western Europe and for the ex-Comecon states now included in the EU, the relativism of some postmodern thinkers couldn’t perform the job that Mohler hoped that we would have achieved. The relativism of postmodern thoughts leads to a still more “sensate” world of decay, that the late and regretted French thinker Philippe Muray called the “festivism”, mocking the current trend to invent new “postmodern” festivities like Gay Prides to replace traditional and liturgical religious festivals or ceremonies. Mohler hoped that postmodernity would have restored an ironical criticism banking on the traditional irony of Ancient Greek philosophy (Diogenes), on the famous “Hammer’s philosophy” of Nietzsche aiming at generalizing a “joyful knowledge” and on some aspects of the Heideggerian will to “fluidify the concepts”, that’s to say to eliminate all the rigidities the concepts had acquired by time because of the bad habits of starchy philosophers who only could repeat stupidly what their brilliant teachers in the past had said, so that they were constantly losing the substance and rigidifying the forms. Heidegger had been ordered by Conrad Grober, his parish priest (who as an eminent theologist became later the Archbishop of Freiburg-im-Breisgau), to study the concepts of Aristoteles in order to think beyond the rigid concepts the Scholastics had clumsily fabricated out of the genuine Aristotelian materials. According to Grober, Aristoteles’ concepts were more dynamic than static: the schoolmen hadn’t understood properly the meaning of the Greek grammar tenses, that express a variety of time meanings, among which some were rather static and others frankly dynamic. The schoolmen had only kept the static meaning in their narrow brains. Grober wanted to restore the dynamic nuances and save the Catholic faith (it was his main aim!) of sclerosis due to a too static interpretation of Aristoteles’ concepts by the scholastic tradition.

The worldwide adoption of the poor substanceless cosmopolitan cogitations will surely destroy ethnical and ethical values, i. e. the “Volker” and “volkisch”-determined values Herder and the Narodniki wanted to save by a constant acitvity of poets, archeologists, philologists, grammarians and historians as well as the religious traditional values eminent men like Guenon, Evola, Tucci, Schuon, Coomaraswamy, etc. wanted to restore. “Nationalism” in the positive sense of the word, that’s to say in the sense Herder had wanted to impulse in Germany, Russia and elsewhere, implies that you feel as your duty to immerge yourself in your national-ethnical-linguistic surroundings, as actual and non fictional surroundings, in your “Nahe”, your proximity, as Heidegger has taught us and as he had practiced it by drinking beers with his beloved and often forgotten brother Fritz in the pub of his native town of Messkirch in Schwabenland and by having long walks on the paths of the Black Forest near his small chalet of Todtnauberg. Heidegger also stressed the importance of the “Nahe” in a speech he held in plain language for the inhabitants of Messkirch in 1961; the speech was about television: Heidegger explained that television was a devilish device introducing “Farness” (“die Ferne”) into our “proximity” (our “Nahe”), ruining the entrenchments and real-life links we needed as stabile and not uprooted beings. Nowadays with modern devices as MP3, iPods and another useless knick-knacks every possible event or presposterous fancy spectacle is permanently irrupting in our daily lives: strident or cacophonic GSM-bells are ringing when you’re in your bath, in a tramcar, in a romantic restaurant, in your girlfriend’s bed or at a serious meeting, pupils can watch a film in the classroom without being caught by the unaware teacher, young girls and boys are emitting curious sounds in the bus because they’re listening to loud crazy music, so that they’re even conscious of making noises. This kind of subhumanity you can observe now in your daily life is maybe the humanity of the “last men twinkling their eyes” (Nietzsche) but they are surely “people without a centre” as Schuon explained it in his tremedously interesting book “Avoir un centre”, trying simultaneously to find a remedy to this anthropological disaster. Schuon opted for meditation in the Sahara desert or among the Sioux in North America.

These are the very results of the lost of all form of liturgy in religious life: D. H. Lawrence warned against such a lost in his booklet “Apocalypse” and Mircea Eliade devoted almost all his life to the study of real-life faiths. Maybe as Orlando Figes explains it in “Natasha’s Dance”, his recent book about Russian intellectual life before the Bolshevik revolution, the “Old Believers” revolted against the modern world in being in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries because rituals and liturgical sacred gestures were scrapped out of Russian religious life... So you can surely create a virtual community of “nationalists” or of “traditionalists” on the net, you can get a lot of information from all parts of the world but your duty is nevertheless “hic et nunc”, here and nowhere else, now and not in the past or in a hypothetical future, here in the liturgical traditions and gestures that have given cohesion to your ancestors’ communities. If these traditions have been forgotten or mocked away, you simply have to remember them and let them remember by your fellow-countrymen, by performing the sometimes modest job of the philologist or the ethnologist or the archeologist as Herder induced us to do. Scores of people in Western Europe are now trying to revive past gentle and well-balanced traditions, despite the silence of the mainstream medias.

Mass immigration is a weapon to destroy societies, as former US Ambassador Charles Rivkin has acknowledged it: the present-day European societies are destroyed because the relativism —induced by modernity and forcefully imposed by devilish postmodern subversive intellectuals— renders the people unable to find a positive solution to the problem. The immigrants are also destroyed by the simple fact that their traditional family values will also be eradicated, as all will in the short run become “centerless” beings.

- And how would you link your traditional “volkisch” ideas with the suggestion Prof. Dugin has formulated in his 4th Political Theory, for which the “People” as “Volk” or “Narod” remains a subject of history but not expressed as a “nation” in a land or as a “class” but as a “Dasein” according to Heidegger’s philosophy?

Difficult question to answer as I wasn’t sent a copy of Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory”. The “Volker” cannot be efficient subjects of history anymore, even if there are sometimes notable exceptions as the protesting Icelandic people that could escape the choking policy of the cosmopolitan banksters or the Venezuelan people that stood behind Hugo Chavez. Carl Schmitt explained very well that now the real subjects of history are the “Grossraume” (the “Greater Areas”), a volunteer assembly of ethnical or non ethnical countries around a hegemon (super)power. Small nations cannot achieve anything now, except domestic cohesion policies, which are of course duly needed. The BRICS-countries are now all “Greater Areas” and are hegemon in their own domestic territory; they are also able to assemble around their leadership smaller powers in their neighbourhood.

“Dasein” means literally in German “to be there” or the “being-there”, so that we are brought back to the previous question. I am because I am located here. I cannot “be” ubiquitously in two or three different places, so I cannot act as a genuine “zoon politikon” (Aristoteles) if I have no location or a score of locations, like the so-called modern “nomads” that a mainstream pseudo-thinker like Jacques Attali admires so much and suggests as models for future mankind. Man is linked to his “oikos” and cannot be a perfect “zoon politikon” if he lives elsewhere or if he is moving ceaselessly. That’s one aspect. But Heidegger, even if he defined himself as a native of Messkirch, was certainly not a short-sighted thinker. I suppose the aspect Dugin wants to stress in his book is the notion of “authentic man”, willing to escape the world of modern standardization, the world that his student and former girlfriend Hannah Arendt called the “world of the petty jobs”. We live in the anthropological ruins (Evola!) of modern world where mere existence is repetitive, dull, nonsensical. This cannot be “real life” according to existentialist Heidegger. Therefore “Dasein” has, let’s say for the purpose of explaining here the matter in a narrow nutshell, a second meaning in Heidegger philosophy. “Dasein” is often translated into French by the word “existence” (as Sartre did in the late Forties). In this way the “Sein” is simply the world or the universe that was given a sense yet, be it static, lifeless, material or be it vivid, growing, dynamic, vegetal or animal. For a human being, or better said for a “zoon politikon”, “Sein” without a given sense is not enough. He or she has to jump voluntarily into existence and if you jump from (“ex”) an indefinite place, as the mere “Sein” (“res stantes”) is, you arrive of course “there” where you’re born or “there” where you’ve chosen to be, you are “ex” the “res stantes”, i. e. in a dynamic, dangerous world, an “ex-istence”, where you have to struggle or to suffer to be authentic. We are not satisfied with the ruins of modern world, with the mess of the “festivistic” postmodern societies in which we cannot do anything else but rebel. Our “Dasein” is also this rebellion which is the jump out of this mess, or better said the result of the willing jump we had the audacity to perform in order not to rotten in “in-authenticity”. This rebellious jump is performed by thousands and thousands of people throughout the world, resulting in the birth or rebirth in the “real risky and revolutionary life” of the authentic men, the ones who want to remain for ever traditional “zoon politikon” or traditional “Kschatriyas” or “Brahmani”. It is in this sense that I understand your question and subsequently Dugin’s position. Dugin dreams obviously of a worldwide rallying unity of “authentic traditional men” that have set a step backward in front of the mess that modernity is, thus having opted first for what Arnold Toynbee called a “withdrawal” to meditate, to recreate metaphysical authenticity in non modern spiritual areas, like the Old Believers lived in remote villages on the shore of the White Sea or in the deepest forests of Siberia, to come back one day, the day of the “return” (Toynbee), when a new cycle will start.

To think further into this Heidegger and Arendt vision of “authentic life”, I am reading now the works of the Italian theologist Vito Mancuso, who wrote precisely a book significantly titled “La Vita autentica” (= “Authentic Life”).

- In this sense how might political metaphysics become actual in Europe where strong secular moods are now dominating, while you have the rise of Islam within the European societies now as well as on the other side of the Mediterranean?

Dugin indeed very often uses the phrase “political metaphysics”, referring mainly to the traditional corpuses of Guenon and Evola. Dozens of authors revive now, after Evola, Guenon, Schuon and many others what we can call “political metaphysics” or simply “metaphysics”, whereby “metaphysics” can eventually be politicized. Metaphysics as the traditional knowledge of things active and linked together behind the physical appearances, as a non material, intuitive and poetical ability of selected humans to perceive the divine “noumena” beyond the mere “phenomena” has been gradually rejected as a “ridiculous irrationality” in the Western thought patterns and Immanuel Kant proclaimed the end of metaphysics in the last decade of the 18th century. Many tried to save metaphysics from oblivion, others replace it by “culture philosophy” (Hamann, Herder) or by history (Hegel, the Hegelians and the Marxists). The modern and postmodern world rejects metaphysics since the 18th century as well as, since the last phases of this catastrophic shift leading towards present-day visible “Kali Yuga”, culture as cement of societies and history as a prospective move towards a better future, because both culture and history implies also duties. Kant could theorize an ethical approach of duty without metaphysics, because he was the philosopher who declared metaphysics was abolished or to be abolished: this sense of Kantian (Prussian!) duty was ruined in the long run by extreme individualism and consumption society. “Culture” as Hamann or Herder undesrtood it has also vanished and history as it had been formerly conceived by some existentialists (Sartre, Camus, Malraux) and by the Marxists is also mocked and rejected by postmodern relativists. Even the most seducing “Ersatze” of metaphysics are now rejected and mocked by postmodern relativism. Nevertheless it must be said here that the true understanding of metaphysics was only a privilege of intellectual or religious elites, having undergone a long training or initiation: for common people liturgy, religious festivities and rites were factually more important, because they were giving sense to their lifes and were rhythming their daily existence. All these old peasants’ festivities and rites have also vanished out of our everyday life to be replaced by what Philippe Muray calls “attractions”, i. e. media tricks, or “parodies” as Guenon or Evola would have said. Francesco Lamendola, a present-day Italian philosopher, whose articles you can find on high interesting sites like http://www.arianneditrice.it or http://www.centrostudilaruna.it , explained us recently that even the official Catholic Church is now unable, despite certain efforts of Pope Benedict XVI, to revive metaphysics or traditional ways as it has too long tried to ape modern media subcultures to be saved again from total decay: his article was illustrated by a photo showing priests and nuns dancing and twisting their bodies like crazy youths, hippy-style... Once you tolerate such undignified attitudes by the very guardian of your religion you cannot find easily the way back to more worthy positions. Secular bric-a-brac has invaded and neutralized everything in the religious realm of people in America and Western Europe, what induces another current Italian philosopher, Umberto Galimberti, to define christianity as “a religion of the empty heavens” (“la religione dal cielo vuoto”).

What concerns Islam, you must keep in mind that we would fully accept a truely traditional Islam as it has been illustrated by high figures such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Henry Corbin (and his follower Christian Jambet), Michel Chodkiewicz or the Algerian thinker Meriboute. Their visions, that could be spiritual models for Iran and Central Asia, or could be connected with the Iranian medieval mystique (Sohrawardi) or the Flemish-Rhinish mystical tradition (Ruusbroec, Meister Eckhart, Sister Hadewych, Nicolaus von Cues, etc.), have of course nothing to do with present-day salafism or wahhabism or with the inadequacies preached by the Muslim Brotherhood that has set Syria aflame in 1981-82 and once again since about two years. Unfortunately the mix of salafism, wahhabism and Brotherhood’s Islam is currently seducing thousands of young immigrants in Europe today, who then reject both the modernist lunacies and the healthy remains of traditional Europe. Tariq Ramadan’s thoughts have also a real impact nowadays on Muslims in Europe but, even if this Swiss-based Muslim intellectual leader seems to suggest some interesting anti-Western ideas, we should not forget that, according to very recent historical studies performed in the United States and in Germany, his uncle Said Ramadan, another prominent Muslim Brother in the Fifties, helped actively to replace all the pro-European (and anti-Soviet) imams of Munich’s main mosque and Muslim religious centre in Germany by Muslim Brothers with the help of CIA-agents as the Muslim Brothers were at that time plotting against the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (nicknamed the “Pharao” by his domestic foes) for the high benefit of Israel as they are plotting now against the Syrian Baathist power elite. This kind of Islam is, despite American-made “Golems” like Al Qaeda or Bin Laden, an instrument in the hand of the United States and Saudi Arabia and aims under many other projects at recreating a strong strategic “bolt” of islamized or semi-islamized states (Greater Albania, Kosovo, a potentially islamized Macedonia, autonomous Muslim-Turkish areas in Bulgaria, etc.) in the Balkan against Serbia, Europe and Russia, as the Serbian traditionalist thinker, diplomat and artist Dragos Kalajic observed attentively before his early death some years ago. Kalajic used to call this project the “dorsale islamique dans les Balkans”.

- We see that many people are protesting in the streets of many European capitals but how resistance can occur and develop in “bourgeois societies” like these of the EU?

First “bourgeois” societies are going to vanish if middle classe people and workers all together will be completely ruined by inflation and economical crisis. In Spain, Portugal and Greece you’ve surely a social agitation but not a revolutionary spirit able to modify thoroughly society. In iceland the demonstrations have at least compelled the government to refuse to pay banks back and to sue the responsible ministers and throw them in jail. In Italy, the last elections, with the success of Beppe Grillo, prove that people don’t believe in the usual corrupted parties of the worn-out old partitocracy: this is a good thing, proving that the election process, presented in the media as the quintessence of true democracy, is ruined, is pure fake, as soon as non elected technocrats are taking over power in spite of people’s rejection of corruption and technocratic governance. In Belgium the conventional trade unions tried to mobilize their militants so that they refuse austerity but tell us nothing about the too high prices for energy, food in supermarkets and insurance fees, that are eroding the purchase power of all our fellow-citizens. In France, the situation is astonishing: people were tired of neo-liberal Sarkozy but reject also socialist Hollande whereby protests are focussed on homosexual marriage. France seems to reject left-wing Voltairian pan-criticism and the typical French May-68 ideology for which homosexuality, gender problems, criminality, marginality, etc. were considered as an aspect of a certain intellectual and moral superiority in front of the conventional mass of heterosexual women and men, of fathers and mothers: this previously non politicized mass seems now to be fed up to be seen by all mainstream medias as inferior (or as potential fascist thugs) and mocked by the so-called “intellectual elite”. Gender speculations and Gay Prides were also set out as expressions of the true “Republican values”, which are now rejected by a wider mass of citizens reacting in a non materialistic, non “sensate” way. This could be a way out of the bourgeois mentality which is of course “sensate” in the definition once given by Pitirim Sorokin.

- In Gramsci’s words, citizens need a consensus for managemant and co-evolution but it seems now that the Euro-bureaucracy and the transnational financists have usurped all the necessary tools for decision-making...

Technologically speaking we don’t live in Gramsci’s time anymore so we must avoid all anachronisms. Gramsci was influenced by the Italian neo-Macchiavellian school of sociology (Mosca, Pareto, Michels) where the notions of ruling (oligarchy) and challenging elites (revolutionists) were very important. Gramsci was the main thinker of the pre-Fascist Italian communist movement, in which he saw an instrument to abolish the power of the Italian oligarchy (his beloved brother on the contrary saw Fascism as a better instrument to control the oligarchy!). In order to be efficient, the revolutionists had to start a cultural struggle mainly by using popular and classical theater as a tool. So did the Futurists around Marinetti, who became fascists, and so did Brecht in Germany, who remained a communist. In the eyes of Gramsci, modern Italian street theater would create consensus but now the heirs of the non communist but leftist (Lenin: “leftism as the infantile illness of communism”!) are creating dissensus in French society and the pussy riots or femen “happenings” in the purest Sixties’ style are mainly considered as vulgar and ridiculous. True “subversion” of the establishment’s power can only be now a kind of blowback, a return of the usual “decency” of traditional societies as George Orwell wanted also in his time to be the main option of socialist forces in Britain and elsewhere. Orwell and his heir the Slavist Anthony Burgess (who is not read anymore...) rejected deviant behaviours within the Left as it was, in their eyes, the best tools of the oligarchies to cancel the efficiency of peoples’ protest.

The Eurocracy is now generally rejected in all Western European countries. The policy of austerity leads to a general contestation of the Eurocratic power so that at the end of April this year they announced officially that they would find out another solution. But it is impossible for them to change their type of governance as they would automatically and definitively be expelled from power. Europe has now to make a choice: either she takes the option for the shortsighted oligarchy’s “economical/financial reasons” or she makes the decision in favour of the “vital reasons”. The first option means political derath; the second, survival.

- What do politicians and geopoliticans in Europe think about Russi and other Eurasian countries such as India and China?

Politicians and mainstream opinion-makers generally follows what NATO says. In France, despite the present-day revolt against the May 68-elites, the “nouveaux philosophes” still determine foreign policy. Bad things are said about Russia, of course, as Putin is described as a kind of “new Stalin” who manipulates all elections held in your country. In China the Human Rights are said to be fully neglected and Tibet is considered as crushed as well as the Uighours of Chinese Turkestan (Sin Kiang). India is perhaps better perceived, except when the BJP-Hindu nationalists are in power. The geopolitical schools in Europe on the contrary have an objective view on Russia, India and China. In Germany people as Peter Scholl-Latour or Alexander Rahr knows that the United States are constantly imposing geopolitical views that are opposite to the natural interests of Germany. Aymeric Chauprade, who published his books on geopolitics by the “Ellipses” publisher in Paris, was fired from the Military Academy as soon as Sarkozy came to power because he wanted to remain true to the Gaullist independent French position towards NATO. Geopolitical schools see the development of the BRICS-powers as positive because it allows us to escape America-centrered unipolarity on the international chessboard and, above all things, create a multipolar cohesion in the world that will be strongly linked by telluric-continental highways from the Atlantic shores till the Pacific Ocean.

- From the point of view of eurocentrism, what is Russia? Is there any fears of a “yellow threat”?

When we use the word “eurocentrism” in a positive way, we think about historical periods where a kind of Eurasian unity would have been possible without great efforts or was de facto actualized. In the 18th century, Louis XVIth, Maria Theresa of Austria and Catherine of Russia were allied against the Turks and the British (at least unofficially), and their kingdoms and empires stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, not to forget that Russia possessed at that time Alaska, the Hawai and a portion of the Pacific Coast of North America till Fort Ross on the former Russian-Spanish border in California! The Holy Alliance or Pentarchy (as Constantin Frantz called it) was an implict alliance from Ireland to Alaska that was deliberately destroyed by the British and the French at the time of the Crimean War. The “Drei-Kaiser-Bund” (the “Three-Emperors-Alliance”) of Germany, Austria and Russia was also an implicit alliance but not so strong as the two previous ones, as the Western Atlantic coast was lost and as the United States had become a non negligible power, that could conquer the Californian coast after a war against Mexico and buy Alaska to allow the Czar to conquer Central Asia. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and the “National-Bolsheviks” among the German diplomats or militants wanted at least a German-Soviet tandem that would have strategically united half Europe and Sovietized Russia, from Hamburg till Vladivostok. The craze of a possible “yellow threat” is not a specific West-European or German phobia, even if Emperor Wilhelm II was maybe one of the main representative of this phobic trend before 1914. The French Slavist Georges Nivat has analyzed the fear of a “Chinese threat” in Russian literature between 1850 and 1914 as well as the ideological rejection of Asian or Buddhist fashions among some Petersburger intellectuals, whereby the “Chinese threat” shouldn’t be seen exclusively as racial but also as a rejection of a too centralized and bureaucratized state. The Imperial Chinese “Mandarinate” was seen as a threat for human freedom and free will, as genuine virtues of “Christianity” (i. e. of European and Ancient Greek culture). In principle China isn’t a danger as China is centered on itself. China proposes the world an international organization where no single power would have the right to interfere in others’ domestic affairs. In Africa, the only problem China can create is on the level of high sea fishing: if Africans cannot benefit from the fish along their own coasts, they risk an awful food dependancy that could have catastrophic consequences, especially if coupled with the already existing food shortages and the draughts in the Sahel area.

- Nikolai Danilevski in his book “Russia and Europe” wrote that Europeans were afraid of Russia because of its huge landmass overhanging over Europe... But we have also differences in religion, ethos, etc.

We’ve stated since long that Russian patriots are swinging between a Danilevski-oriented nationalism and a Leontiev-oriented traditionalism. Danilevski was partially influenced by Darwinism like some but not all “Pangermans” and saw a coming struggle for survival and domination between “old peoples” (Britain, France) and “young peoples” (Russia, the Slavs in general). Leontiev was more traditional and ortthodox and wanted the status quo being preserved, especially in the Balkans. The Europeans feared Russia’s demographic boom in the 19th century, exactly as Europeans and Russians had also feared Chinese demography or fear the current African or Northern African population boom or as the French at the end of the 19th century were obsessed by the increase of German population, while their own population was decreasing. Russia in the 19th century was mainly a threat not for Europe, as France, Belgium, Germany invested a lot in Russia, but for British liberalism and for British India as soon as the Czar’s armies managed to control Central Asia till the Afghan borders: huge armies could have been ready to invade India, the cornerstone of the British Empire and the key to control the “Heart Sea”, which is the Indian Ocean. The Crimean War, that destroyed the strategical unity of Pentarchy, as the embodiment of European civilization, and weakened Russia only for a couple of decades, is the very source of the geopolitical and metaphysical opposition between East and West, as Dostoievsky pointed it out in his “Diary of a Writer”. The West appeared as a subversive force that was undermining the unity of “Christianity” (i. e. Europe and Russia perceived as a strategical unity). According to Constantin Frantz, the lack of interest in European unity in France and Britain was due to colonialism: both French and British empires hadn’t their centre in Europe anymore and could survive without the necessity of a unity: this lead directly to the catastrophe of World War One. The differences in religion and ethos can more easily be bridged, at the sole condition that Catholics or Protestants aren’t trying to convert others by all means, not only in Russia or in Orthodox countries but also in Muslim areas, in China or in India. Protestants US based sects should also give up their missions in Catholic Latin America. The giving up of proselytism should be one condition of world peace alongside the renouncing to interfere in domestic policies as the Chinese have asked for.

This week, the French weekly magazine “Valeurs actuelles” (n°3989) publishes a world map showing the “clash between religious dynamics” where not only Islam or Muslim fundamentalism is pushing forward in Muslim countries, in Africa (Nigeria) or in India but where the mostly US based “Evangelic churches” are thriving tremendously as they are extremely active in Latin America (and in Spain due to Latino immigration!), in Catholic Black Africa (West Africa, Congo, Angola, etc.), in China, Japan and the Philippines. The map shows us also the progression of “religious diversity” in the United States, in Australia, in all European countries, in Russia and in China, Corea and Japan. “Religious diversity” means obviously a decrease in social coherence when this diversity is imported and means also, one should not forget it, a general and problematic uprooting of people when “natural” or “native” religions are disappearing, even in their christianized or islamized syncretic forms (see the recent tragical fate of Tumbuctu mosques and libraries or of the Serbian Orthodox monastries in Kosovo). Both the conquests of Wahhabism (or Salafism) and of the American “Evangelic Churches” are proofs of the victories of “unipolarity” even if the United States pretend to be the main foe of “Al Qaeda”. Both hyper-active fundamentalisms, i. e. Saudi Wahhabism and US-perverted Evangelism, aims at conquering or re-conquering lost territories or territories that had been previously immunized against Puritanical-Wahhabite subversion, for instance by intelligent and efficient civilian-military developing regimes. Latin America has reached a certain level of independance thanks to the Mercosur common market, the indigenist positions of Morales in Bolivia or the anti-imperialist actions and diplomacy of late President Chavez: the South-American continent risks in the long run to be totally subverted and reconquered by the social action of the Evangelic churches. In Africa it is obvious that the secret aim of these churches is to cut French-speaking Africa from France and the EU and to replace French or European (and Chinese!) influence by American domination in order to get the oil of this part of the world. In China the Evangelical moves have as purpose to break the cohesion of the Han Chinese society and to create confusion and dissensus, exactly like in the 19th century when a civil war lead by a curious convert to a kind of strange christianity cost China more than 20 millions dead. So this religious subversion is one of the weapons used to eliminate China as a competitor superpower in the Far East, like military containment, support of fundamentalist Uighurs in Sinkiang, Cyberwarfare, etc. are other weapons pointed against Beijing.

The increase of “religious diversity” in the main countries of the EU means a lost of social and political cohesion that corresponds to the purposes of the geopolitician Robert Strauss-Hupe, who became an adviser of the US presidents Roosevelt and Truman, alongside a certain Mr. Morgenthau who wanted to transform Germany into a bucolic agrarian state in the very middle of Europe. Now, as Socialist Thilo Sarrazin fears it, Germany will be unable to produce the needed engineers to let the German industrial machine work properly. The same is true for other European countries and so Morgenthau’s dream risks to become reality: Germany as a weak industrial country animated by crazy sociologists, who would be a kind of leisure class priesthood, that would impose a “festivist” way of life (with ubiquitous sexual permissiveness and with the “femens” as new tarty nuns!) and would flay as “fascist” all those who would plead for a more rational society (see Helmut Schelsky, “Die Arbeit tun die Anderen”).

- Thank you, Mr. Steuckers, for having answering these questions. Do you want to add something or to formulate some other remarks?

Caucuses like yours and ours should study geopolitics and history in all their aspects and know all about the forces that activate the Muslim world from the Atlantic coasts of Morrocco to the tiniest islands of Indonesia. We must create a world elite of men and women totally immune to the artificial propagandas produced by US based media agencies. Therefore we must meet as often as possible, exchange ideas by means of interviews, but at a more trepident tempo as it has been done till yet: the others are not lazy, so we may certainly not be less active, otherwise the metapolitical battle will be definitively lost for us.

lundi, 25 mars 2013

- Could you describe in a few key words the essence and goals of your movement? Does it place itself in an existing sociopolitical-historical trend of Russian politics? Does it lobby in Russian government circles to achieve its goals?

The main idea and goal of the International Eurasian Movement is to establish a multipolar

world order, where there will be no dictatorship of the U.S. anymore or of any other country or actor of world politics. In the sector of ideology we strongly reject (neo)liberalism and the

globalization process as its derivative. We agree that we (as well as other nations) need a

constructive platform for our alternative future. In the search of it, our work is directed to

dialogue with other cultures and peoples who understand the meaning and necessity of

conservative values in contemporary societies. Speaking about Russian reality, we are heirs and assigns to the former eurasianists (this ideology was born in the 1920s): Piotr Savitsky, Nikolay Trubetskoy, Nikolay Alekseev as well as Lev Gumilev – the famous Soviet scholar. They all studied historical processes and proposed a unique vision of our history, separate from the eurocentric science approach. The understanding that Russia is not part of Europe or Asia, but forms a very own unique world, named Eurasia, is also implemented in our political activity. In cooperation with members of parliament or the Council of the Federation or other governmental bodies, with our advices and recommendations, we always provide a strong basis linked to our history, culture, diversity and so on. And I must tell you that many people understand and support our ideas and efforts (in governmental structures, local and regional authorities, science and education, religious institutions and in society at large).

- What is your vision on a multipolar world? Which role do you see for Western European

nations? Do they have any future at all on the world stage of the 21st century? Will they

surmount the actual crises on a demographic, metaphysical and mental level?

In my opinion, a multipolar world is the order with 5 or more centers of power in the world and this reality will keep our planet more safe and balanced with shared responsibility between the regions. But it is not just interdependence by the logic of liberalism: some regions might well exist in relative political and economic autarky. Beside that, there might exist a double core in one center (for example Arabs and Turks in a large Muslim zone or Russia and Central Asian states for Eurasia) and shifted and inter-imposed zones, because, historically, centers of power can be moved. Of course at the moment the most significant centers of power are described in terms of nuclear arms, GDP, economic weight/growth and diplomatic influence. First of all we already have more poles than during the Soviet-US opposition. Secondly, everybody understands the role of China as a ‘Bretton Woods-2’, as well as emerging countries under acronyms as BRICS or VISTA, “anchor countries” and so on. And, thirdly, we see the rise of popular and unconventional diplomacy and the desire of many countries (many of them are strong regional actors such as Iran, Indonesia and Brazil) to not follow the U.S. as satellites or minor partners.

Of course, Washington does not like this scenario and tries to make coalitions based on states

with a neocolonial background or on dutiful marionettes. But even in the U.S., politicians and

analysts understand that the time of unipolar hegemony has gone. They are trying to build a more flexible approach to international relations, called ‘multilateralism’ (H. Clinton) or ‘non-polarity’ (R. Haas), but the problem is that the U.S. do not have enough confidence in foreign actors united as joint, but who still have no strong alternative to the contemporary world order. So, they use another option for destabilization of rising regions, known as controlled chaos. Because of its military presence over most parts of the globe and its status of promoter of democracy and the protection of human rights, the White House can justify its own interests in these places. And cyberspace is also the object of manipulation, where the whole world is divided in two camps that remind us of the times of the Cold War (I call it ‘Cold Cyber War’).

We think that the contemporary West European nations are one of the poles (centers of power) in a forthcoming multipolar world order). But the problem for now is their engagement in U.S. proatlanticist politics, as manifested in the Euro-Atlantic chart of cooperation (common market, legislation and regulation mechanisms, including items of domestic politics), as well as NATO activity. The same we see on the other side of Eurasia – attempts of Washington to start trans-Atlantic cooperation with Asian countries. The contemporary crisis is neither good nor bad. It’s a fact. And the European nations must think about the way they’ll choose, because it will form the future (at least in Europe). It is not the first time in history: during the middle ages there was decline of population because of pestilence and wars. Religious schisms also occurred, so Europeans have some experience in metaphysics and ethics dealing with system failure too. The point is that now we have more interconnected reality and the speed of information sharing is fantastic, that was not possible, imagine, a century ago. And European society becomes more consumerist! But even in Europe, there are a lot of voices in respect of nature (organic greens), anti-grow movements (in economics) and traditionalists who try to keep and preserve ethnic and historical values and manners. Even the Soviet experience could be useful: after the Great Social Revolution there was a strong anti-church attitude promoted by the government, but after 70 years we’re back at our roots (of course during all this time not all people were atheists and the return to church happened during Stalin’s period when the institute of the Patriarchy was restored).

- How do you see the dialogue of civilizations in the light of more than 10 years of wars

between the West and the Muslim world? Where does Russia stand in this opposition? Are there fears of an islamization process within the Russian Federation, or are Russian

authorities setting on long-time accommodation with Muslim minorities and actors?

At first we must bear in mind that the idea of Huntington (the ‘clash of civilizations’) was

developed out of necessity of justifying the U.S.’s military and economic expansion. His book

was issued when the first wave of globalization as the highest principle of Westcentrism just

began its tide in the Third World. By the logic of neoliberal capitalism it must be re-ordered and re-programmed in the search for new markets. All non-western societies must consume western products, services and technologies by this logic. And let’s remember that war against the Muslim countries originated from the neocons from Washington. So, these 10 years of wars that you to mention is nothing more than a provoked conflict by a small group that was very powerful in American politics at the beginning of the 2000s. By the way, all kinds of radical Islam (Wahhabism) were promoted by the United Kingdom. This version of Islam was founded in Saudi Arabia only with London’s special support. The Great Game in Eurasia was started many years ago and Britain has played here a most significant role. The U.S. took this role only after WW2, but many destructive processes were already unleashed. Of course, Russia is suspicious of the radical Islam, because emissaries of the wahhabis and al-Qaeda were already in the Northern Caucasus. And still now, there are different terrorist groups with the idea of the socalled “Emirate of the Caucasus”. There were also attempts to spread another sectarian belief promoted by Fetullah Gullen (Nurjular), but for now this sect is prohibited here. Actually Islam is not a threat to Russia, because, traditionally, a lot of people living here are Muslim. Regions like Tatarstan, the North Caucasus republics, Bashkortostan have an Islamic population. And our government supports traditional Islam here.

- What do you think about the American/Western strategy of strategic encirclement of

Russia? Can we see this as well in the process of the so-called 'Arab Spring'? Is an open,

Western-waged war against Syria and Iran possible and would it be the onset to a major

world conflict, a 'Third World War'? Where would Russia stand?

It works. Not only because of the reset of the Anaconda strategy for Eurasia by means of military presence. Sometimes it doesn’t manifest in classical bases. Logistics is the main element of contemporary warfare, as well as C4ISR – Command, Control, Computer, Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance – works in the vein of smart engagement. Other tools are: economics, promotion of democracy and human rights, cyber politics. The Arab Spring is a very complex phenomenon – there are a couple of components, but you can see that the U.S. has a bonus anyway: Egypt has asked for a huge loan from the World Bank; Western companies go to Libya; Muslim extremists are being manipulated against moderate Muslims, because they are a threat to western interests and so on. Organized chaos is just another view on the socio-political reality in turbulence. As Steve Mann (famous theorist of the chaos principle in diplomacy) wrote: the state is just hardware and ideology is its soft version. It were better to use ‘virus’ (in other words ‘promoting democracy’) and not to break PC. Syria and Iran are interesting for many nations now. The hysteria of Israel is not good, because this country has nuclear weapons. What will come of Israel using it? The Palestinian question is also on the table. I think that Israel is a more serious problem than Syria and Iran. Russia firmly supports Syria and takes a moderate

position on Iran. During the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia declined to provide the “S-300” rocket complex to Iran (we had already signed the contract) and the deal was canceled. You bear in mind that during the same time Russia supported resolution 1973 of UN Security Council and the West started operation “Odyssey Dawn” against Libya. So, even VIP politicians in Russia sometimes do wrong things! But Mr. Putin is actively pro-Syrian and I think that the position of Russia about Iran and about Western pressure will be more adequate than before. As foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told: “we got experience with Libya and don’t believe the West anymore”.

- What do you think about the Western Europeans: should they remain loyal to their

historical-political heritage of individualism and atlanticism, or should they rethink

themselves and orient themselves towards Russia and continentalism? What about pro-

Russian elements in European society? Can they be partners or are they, politically and

socially spoken, too marginal for that?

John M. Hobson, in his brilliant work The eurocentric conception of world politics, made very

clear that the West is rooted in the logic of immanence instead of the logic of co-development

that is characteristic of non-western societies. He continues that the formula “the West and the Rest” is wrong, because without the rest there is no place for the West. Now we see one United Europe, but in real life we have two levels. The first one is presented by the bureaucratic establishment with its symbols, history, power projections and procedures. The second one is active publicity with movements, political parties and personal activists who are not interested in an Orwellian future with “Big Brother”, universal values and so on. Actually, in geography we have more than one substance. And where is the border between Southern, Western and Eastern Europe? It’s mostly in the minds. From history we remember the Celtic space, the Roman Empire, the Germanic and nomad invasions (Huns, Avars, etc.), that shows that the face of Europe permanently changed throughout the centuries. Now the European population includes people from Africa and Asia and soon the demographic balance will change. Political culture will change too. Without Russia, Europe is impossible. Not only because of geography (just look at the map and you will see that the EU is just the small, overpopulated western peninsula of Eurasia), but also because of the role of Russia in European history. Napoleon and Hitler – the two most significant unifiers of Europe - were stopped and defeated in Russia and, after that, new political orders were established. And for now in Europe we have so many Russian “prints”: in culture, history, the role of some persons and diasporas. I think that pro-Russian elements just now have a very good choice, because the window of opportunity is open. All these elements could form an avant-garde of a new kind of cooperation: in trade relations, science, art and education and public diplomacy. The last one is the tie for all activities. Actually Minister Lavrov just today (i.e. 26.02.2013) announced that, because of the Russia year in the Netherlands and vice versa, there will be more than 350 actions on state level. It is a good sign of mutual respect and it may be deeper.

- What about key power Germany? Do you believe in, let's say, an 'Indo-European bloc',

an axis Berlin-Moscow-New Delhi, as a formidable counterweight to the atlanticist bloc of

the axis Washington-London-Paris? Do the horrors of the Second World War still affect

Russians' views of Germany and the Germans, or is it possible to turn the page on both

sides and look forward? What about the French: do they belong in the atlanticist bloc, or

can they be won for the continentalist bloc without giving in to their chauvinism? And what

about China: will it turn out to be an even more dangerous enemy than the USA, or will

both Russia and China remain strategic partners, e.g. within the SCO?

Because the EU has two levels, the same is true for Germany. One Germany, represented by the political establishment, is pro-U.S. and cannot do anything without Washington. Another one (latent or potential) is looking for closer cooperation with Russia. At the time of the Russian Empire a lot of German people came to our country at the invitation of Empress Catherine the Great. Even before that, many foreigners were in Russia as military officers, teachers, technical specialists, etc. People’s potential can do a lot of things. We must keep in mind that, besides Sea Power and Land Power in geopolitics, we have Man Power, which is the unique and main axis of any politics. The problem is that, after WWII, there was in most European countries a strong influence of Britain and the U.S.. They used very black propaganda and the peoples of Europe were afraid of a communist invasion. The U.S. even started more horrible projects in Western Europe (for example Propaganda-Due and operation “Gladio” in Italy, as well as “Stay Behind” NATO secret armies, formed from right-wing extremist elements). Still now in the EU, we see anti-Russian propaganda, but our borders are open and any European can go to Russia and see what happens here. The case of Gérard Depardieu is just one example.

If we look at what happens in China we’ll understand that it is a very strong actor and that its

power grows from year to year. In the UN Security Council China is an important partner of

Russia (for the Syria voting too). Russia is a supplier of oil and gas to China and we have new

agreements for the future. Besides that we provide military equipment to China, though they

have good weapon systems of their own as well. In the SCO we had good results and I think that cooperation in this organization must be enlarged through strategic military elements with the entry at least of Iran, Belarus, India and Pakistan (they have an observer or dialogue partner status). Turkey is interested as well, but because of its NATO membership it will be difficult to join.

I know that some Russians and Europeans describe China as a possible enemy, a “yellow threat” (the Polish writer Ignacy Witkiewicz even wrote about it in his novel in 1929!!!) and so on, but in reality China has no intents of border pretence to Russia. We have had some incidents in Siberia with contraband, but these are criminal cases which do not deal with state politics. China will focus on Taiwan and on the disputed islands in the Pacific and it will take all geopolitical attention and may be some loyalty from Russia and SCO members.

Also China has the same view on the future world order – multipolarity. Actually this idea

(duojihua) was born in China in 1986. And with the strategic cooperation with many other

countries in Africa and South America, joint efforts against western hegemony will be fruitful.

So, I think China and Russia can do a lot for a reform of the forthcoming world order.

A lot of people now want to forget their own origins and the origins of other peoples. Bavaria,

for example, was populated centuries ago by Avars from Asia (part of them still live in the

Caucasus) during the Migration Period. Groups of Turkish origin also went to lands of

contemporary Austria. So in contemporary Europe we have a lot of Asian elements. And vice

versa in Asia we have people of Aryan origin. Not only in the North of India, but also in

Tajikistan, Pakistan, Iran (arya is the self-name of the people of Iran and India). And

hybridization is continuing as we speak in Europe and in other regions. Just before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union we had a pact with Germany and had been cooperating extensively in technologies and in the economy. And France was attacked first by Germany, but now relations between both countries are normal. I think that historical harms between Germany and Russia have been mostly forgotten. And I think that many Germans still remember that the most destructive attacks did not come from the Soviet army but from U.S. and British air forces (Dresden, Leipzig...). It was not a war, but a deliberate destruction of cities and non-armed refugees. Actually now Germans is mostly good businessmen for Russians, compared to representatives of other European nations (these facts have been confirmed by many friends who do business with Europeans).

I can not to speak with enough certainty of what happens with Russian-French relations, because I'm not very interested in this sector. During the XXth century we had many deals with France and after WWII it was the idea of Stalin to give the winner status to France. Charles de Gaulle also was pro-Soviet in a geopolitical sense. But after the legalization of the gay marriage in France, many Russians feel suspicious about this country. But every people and every country has its own specifics. We have had many interesting philosophers from France who have had influence on Russian thinkers too.

- Turning to domestic Russian problems: Russia under President Putin has been able to

make enormous progress in the social field, mainly due to energy sales during the 2000s.

Has this changed the face of Russia? Has this period come to an end or is there stagnation? How will Russia cope with its domestic problems, such as the demographic crisis, which it shares with Western Europe? Should the Siberian land mass be 're-colonized' by Russians and other Europeans, in order to make it an impregnable 'green lung fortress' for the white peoples?

The grand contribution of Mr. Putin is that he stopped liberal privatization and the process of

separatism in Russia. Persons such as Chodorkovsky were representatives of the Western

oligarchy, especially of powerful financial clans (for example, he is a personal friend of

Rothschild) and he had plans to usurp power in Russia through the corruption of parliament. We still have the rudiments of predatory liberalism such as misbalances, corruption, fifth column, degradation of traditional values, etc. For now we see in Russia efforts to build a smarter kind of economics, but it must be done very carefully. The questions that must be at the center are: how to deal with the Federal Reserve System? What about a new currency order that may be represented by BRICS? How to start mobilization? What to do with the neoliberal lobby within the government? The demographic crisis is also linked with neoliberalism and consumerism. A century ago, there was a rise of population in Russia, but two world wars have cut it. Even during Soviet times we had a good demography index. Now the government has started supporting young families and the process of human reproduction. In addition to birth programs we have an initiative dealing with the return of compatriots to Russia and all people who were born in the USSR can come to Russia very easily and get certain funding from the state. But I think that, because the Russians were the state-forming people, there must be a preference for Slavonic origin, because migrants from Asian countries (who do not speak Russian and have other traditions) will flow to Russia for economic reasons. Many Russian activists who take a critical stance on Asian people are already disappointed by this program. I think that the attraction of Byelorussians and Ukrainians can equalize this disproportion. But, strategically, the state must support a system of child-bearing with all necessary needs (fosterage, education, working place, social environmental, etc.). In some regions governors personally start up that kind of programs dealing with local and regional solidarity. First of all, Siberia is still Russian. The Siberian type of Russian is different from citizens from the central or southern regions, but till now it's still mainly Russian, not only institutionally, but also ethnically. Actually, according to our statistics, most labor migrants to Russia come from Ukraine! So, in spite of strange relations between both countries and with strong anti-Russian stances on the part of Ukrainian nationalists and pro-western "democrats", people just make their own choice. Rationally speaking, Siberia is not only interesting, because of its virgin forests and natural resources, but also because of its neighbors - and China is one of them with an emerging economy. So Siberia could serve as a hub in the future. I think that Europeans would also go to

Russia (not only to Siberia), but this migration must be done meticulously, because of the

language barrier, with a period of adaptation to different social conditions and so on. Maybe it could be useful to organize towns of compact residence and also city-hubs for foreign people who come to live in Russia, where they can live and work in new conditions. New Berlin, New Brussels, New Paris (of course translated into the Russian language) will then appear on a new Russian map.

- What is your opinion about the future of Putinist Russia? Will the government be able to

enduringly counter Western propaganda and destabilization campaigns, and come to a

'generation pact' between the older generation, born during Soviet times, and the younger

generation, born after 1991? What will be President Putin's fundamental heritage for

Russian history?

The key problem for Russia is a neoliberal group inside the Kremlin. Putin has the support of

people who want more radical actions against corruption, western agents and so on. But a

“colored revolution” in Russia is impossible, because the masses do not believe in the prowestern opposition. Ideas of democracy and human rights promoted by West have been

discredited worldwide and our people understand well what liberalization, privatization and such kind of activities in the interest of global oligarchy mean. And because of the announcement of the Eurasian Customs Union Russia must work hard the coming years with partners from Kazakhstan and Belarus. As for counterpropaganda, the new official doctrine of Russian foreign policy is about soft power. So Russia has all the instruments officially legalized to model its own image abroad. In some sense we do this kind of work, just as other non-governmental organizations and public initiatives. You mention a “generation pact”, referring to different ideals of young and older people, especially in the context of the Soviet era. Now, you would be surprised that a figure as Stalin is very popular among young people and thinking part of the youth understands well that Soviet times were more enjoyable than contemporary semi-capitalism. As I told in my previous answer, Putin is important because he stopped the disintegration of Russia. He already is a historical figure.

- Is there a common 'metaphysical future' for the whole of Europe after the downfall of

Western Christianity (catholicism, protestantism)? Can Russian Orthodoxism be a guide?

What do you hold of the modest revival of pre-Christian religious traditions across the

continent? What about countering the influence of Islam on the European continent? Is

there a different view concerning that discussion between Russia and Western Europe?

Russian Christian Orthodoxy is not panacea, because there are also some problems. Christianity in XIIth century, XVIth century and nowadays is very different. Now many formal orthodox Christians go to church two times a year, at Easter and at Christmas. But Orthodox Christianity is also a thesaurus of wisdom where you can find ideas from ancient Greek philosophy, metaphysics, cultural heritage, transformed paganism and psychology. In this sense, Russian Christian Orthodox old believers keep this heritage alive and may be interested as well in forms (ceremonies) as in the spiritual essence with its complex ideas. Speaking about paganism, Russia is the only country in Europe that still has authentic pagan societies (Republics of Mari-El, Mordovia, Komi) with very interesting rites and traditions. Actually Finno-Ugric peoples historically were very close to Slavonic people and assimilated together, so there is a good chance to research these traditions for those who are interested in Slavonic pre-Christian culture. But the postmodern version of a restored paganism in Europe or any other region to my opinion is just a fake and there is not so much from true paganism. As for Islam, as I told before, in Russia there exist a couple of versions of traditional Islam, which are presented by several law schools (mazhabs). In the Northern Caucasus, the regional government has tried to copy the idea of multiculturalism and to implement EuroIslam as an antithesis to spreading wahhabism. But it has not worked and now more attention is paid to traditional religious culture linked with education and the social sector. But the project of multiculturalism has failed in Europe as well, so all common Euro-Russian outlooks on Islam are finished. But, to be honest, I think that Europe must learn from the Russian experience of coexistence of different religions (not forgetting paganism and shamanism – this belief is widely found in Siberia). In Europe, they use the term tolerance but we, eurasianists, prefer the term complimentarity, proposed by Lev Gumilev, meaning a subconscious sympathy between different ethnic groups. As Gumilev explained, Russia became so large because Russians, during the expansion, looked on other people as on their own and understood them. This differs from the point of view (more specifically in ethnosociology) that all ethnic groups have the idea of “We are” against “The Other”, represented by another group. The imperial principle works with the idea of mosaics where every ethnos is a “We are”. And our famous writer and philosopher Fjodor Dostoevsky told about all-human (all-mankind) nature (not common to all mankind) that is represented by

the Russians, because inside, you can find all radical oppositions. I think it is a good reason to turn to Russia and its people.

Thank you, Mr Savin, for this very interesting and open-hearted interview.